The Bone Clocks

Holly Sykes is fifteen in the summer of 1984 when she runs away from her home in Gravesend. She hears voices and has seen things she cannot explain, and what follows that afternoon marks the rest of her life. Two groups of mystics, opposed to one another, take an interest in her.

They are fighting an invisible war that began long before anyone Holly knows suspects it. Her path crosses with a charming, morally flexible Cambridge student, a war correspondent in Iraq, and a novelist whose success is fading. It also crosses with an immortal who is reborn into new bodies.

The book falls into six parts. A different character narrates each in the first person, and together they span the years from 1984 to 2043. Every part shifts tone and genre. The early one reads as a coming-of-age story, a later one as literary satire, another as a conspiracy thriller.

The whole is a metaphysical thriller that also turns over the question of mortality. The final part looks ahead to a near-future world under strain.

It appeared in 2014. The 2015 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel went to it, and it made the Man Booker Prize longlist. Its universe is shared with other David Mitchell novels, so anyone who has read Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet will recognise links.