‘What if … what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you’re dying of thirst, or when someone’s nice to you for no reason, or …’ Mam’s pancakes with Toblerone sauce Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite’ or Jacko and Sharon singing ‘For She’s A Squishy Marshmallow’ instead of ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’ every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it’s not at all funny and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. Her mind and heart just beginning to mature, she’s full of wisdom like: She’s left behind a loving, if complicated, family life to embark on a short, ill-conceived, monumental journey. The novel begins in the voice of Holly Sykes, a runaway of fifteen years, scathing and sassy and delightfully (Britishly) teenaged. Mitchell’s fans will recognize recurring characters and entities, part of what he has dubbed his “uber-novel.” The symmetry is not explicit, the connection between characters is more grounded in the mess of reality, and the aforementioned universe is expanded until it becomes clear that nearly all of Mitchell’s work will be set within it.

This novel, however, is not so tightly constructed. The Bone Clocks, like Mitchell’s award-winning Cloud Atlas, is told with linked narratives. It is not a preview, or prequel, exactly, but it “occupies the same universe.” One where, to summarize, the mind is both a weapon and a battleground, our little life is rounded with a sleep to which some beings are immune, and the mundane is pierced suddenly and briefly with wondrous sights we will never understand.

But it’s only a taste of what you’ll find in The Bone Clocks. The Twitter story is a deliciously spooky read, and the most successful one of its kind, in my opinion. But David Mitchell far surpasses Gaiman in his literary ability, scope and ambition. Mitchell calls Neil Gaiman one of his greatest fantasy influences, and here you can see why – the horror and absurdity in “The Right Sort” is very like Gaiman’s latest, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Just before The Bone Clocks was published, David Mitchell wrote a Twitter story called “The Right Sort,” which has been collected in full on The Millions. Empires die, like all of us dancers in the strobe-lit dark.

The bone clocks goodreads