The Bone Clocks

Holly Sykes is fifteen when a bitter row with her mother over a boyfriend sends her out the door and away from home. She is not an ordinary runaway. As a young child she heard voices she called "the radio people," and she has stayed unusually open to things other people cannot perceive. As she drifts further into the English countryside, strange visions and eerie coincidences pile up until her surroundings begin to feel like a waking nightmare. Holly has been noticed by a secretive group of dangerous mystics, and by the people who oppose them. Her days on the road turn out to be only the start. A disappearance follows that leaves her family permanently damaged, and the unanswered questions around it carry through each decade of her life, touching the people she loves and even those not yet born. The story is told through a changing cast of narrators: an ambitious Cambridge scholarship student set on wealth and influence, a father who only feels alive when reporting from the war in Iraq, and a middle-aged novelist grieving his fall from the bestseller lists. Each is caught up in a hidden war fought at the edges of the visible world. The settings range from the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a Shanghai hotel to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, moves between domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation, following Holly's life from the 1980s into the 2040s. It is an inventive, witty and sprawling novel built from interlocking pieces, with moments of ordinary grace set beside the extraordinary.