Now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, and Hugh Grant, and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski and Tom Tykwer Includes a new Afterword by David Mitchell A postmodern visionary who is also a master of styles and genres, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. "[David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel's every page."'The New York Times Book Review "One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it' modern classics that no doubt is'and should be'read by any student of contemporary literature."'Dave Eggers "Wildly entertaining ... a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative."'People "The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet'not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I've never read anything quite like it, and I'm grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds."'Michael Chabon.