CLOUD ATLAS

The foppish English composer living abroad in the ’30s, the vanity publisher imprisoned in a Scottish nursing home, the flinty female journalist exposing corporate malfeasance--these are three story lines from the six tales Mitchell weaves together in a sequence of literary forms (journal, letters, testament, first-person narrative). Each performer reads a section, but the packaging gives no clue as to who does what. The tales are tenuously connected, and each but the last futuristic episode is interrupted, only to be continued later in reverse order. Confusing? Yes, but the narration is uniformly excellent, and somehow it all hangs together. There’s no going back; individual episodes are unidentified on the discs. The publisher gets kudos for bringing this fine, puzzling, and original novel to the audio format. J.B.G. 2006 Audie Award Finalist © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 05]