The Bone Clocks - tildebooks

English language

Published Nov. 28, 2014

ISBN:: 978-1-4000-6567-7

(1 review)

The Bone Clocks is a novel by British writer David Mitchell. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2014, and called one of the best novels of 2014 by Stephen King. The novel won the 2015 World Fantasy Award. The novel is divided into six sections with five first-person point-of-view narrators. They are loosely connected by the character of Holly Sykes, a young woman from Gravesend who is gifted with an "invisible eye" and semi-psychic abilities, and a war between two immortal factions, the Anchorites, who derive their immortality from murdering others, and the Horologists, who are naturally able to reincarnate. The title refers to a derogatory term the immortal characters use for normal humans, who are doomed to mortality because of their aging bodies.

2 editions

Kadomi@buecher.pnpde.social reviewed The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

A creepy extension of the Mitchellverse

5 stars

I don't know, there's no book of David Mitchell I haven't loved. They aren't perfect, some stuff really weirds me out hardcore, but they're always fascinating. The Bone Clocks fits that scheme as well.

The Bone Clocks covers a timeline of the mid-80s to the year 2043. We get a total of five different PoV characters, and every story shares that it's about the first point of view character, Holly Sykes. Holly heard 'radio voices' as a child but was cured of that by a Chinese doctor. As a teenager she runs away from home because of a tosser boyfriend, and has some kind of supernatural event occur. She eventually finds out that her precocious younger brother Jacko has disappeared.

Over the course of the other stories, we find out that Jacko never re-appeared, that Holly turns into a famous author writing about the voices in her head, and that …

I don't know, there's no book of David Mitchell I haven't loved. They aren't perfect, some stuff really weirds me out hardcore, but they're always fascinating. The Bone Clocks fits that scheme as well.

The Bone Clocks covers a timeline of the mid-80s to the year 2043. We get a total of five different PoV characters, and every story shares that it's about the first point of view character, Holly Sykes. Holly heard 'radio voices' as a child but was cured of that by a Chinese doctor. As a teenager she runs away from home because of a tosser boyfriend, and has some kind of supernatural event occur. She eventually finds out that her precocious younger brother Jacko has disappeared.

Over the course of the other stories, we find out that Jacko never re-appeared, that Holly turns into a famous author writing about the voices in her head, and that there are two factions at war. One of them calls regular people Bone Clocks, hence the title.

The different chapters feel like vignettes, different styles, different personalities, but they all have this common red thread in them, with the supernatural events, with a generous dollop of post-apocalypse in the final chapter. I love sci-fi and fantasy, so I embraced those elements, but it's possible other readers won't.

What I probably love best about the Mitchell books is to sit down afterwards and find all easter eggs, characters and hints from previous books, and I think I found something from every work so far, even number9dream.