The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

David Mitchell may be best known for Cloud Atlas, the sci-fi book published a decade earlier, but 2014’s The Bone Clocks is equally ambitious and intricate. The novel, told through the perspectives of a half dozen characters, spans decades and offers a formidably inventive cosmology as its background and connective tissue. The British writer is a master of plot, and so it would be a shame to reveal what’s beyond each turn through the labyrinth of this narrative maze. But suffice it to say that this is the sort of absorbing fantasy for which one should clear their schedule. Along the way, Mitchell takes on big ideas, like loyalty, transhumanism, free will and mortality, all seamlessly integrated into the story. It’s not a perfect novel, but it does, somehow, make what most would describe as “magic” feel as tangible as the book in one’s hand. —Elijah Wolfson

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