From Hugo – Cambridge conman and lothario – to war reporter Ed – in denial about the fact that he may be addicted to the adrenaline rush of the warzone – to waspish author Crispin Hershey – fading ‘bad boy of English letters’ – Mitchell’s characters may sometimes be unlikeable, but they are always rounded and interesting, often to the point where you end up empathising with them anyway. This is not to say that other characters are shortchanged. The story is split into six different sections, each capable of standing on their own but still managing to form a cohesive whole, and whilst Holly only narrates the first and the last section, she is the sun around which the other characters, both malevolent and benign, revolve. Holly Sykes is a wonderful creation: vulnerable yet tough, with a big mouth and a heart of gold, who we see grow from a naïve and slightly self-absorbed teenager, into a woman who goes on to survive bereavement, illness and hardship, without completely losing her humour and spark. Once again, Mitchell has proven himself not only to be a versatile storyteller, but a master of both character and genre.

Holly begins as an unwitting pawn in the conflict by the end, she will have become the key to its conclusion. It is also the tale of a secret war, centuries old, between two factions of semi-immortals: one benevolent, the other decidedly more predatory. It is the tale of Holly Sykes, whom we first meet as a teenage runaway in nineteen-eighties Gravesend, and lastly, as an old woman living in a remote part of coastal Ireland. Moving on from the more straightforward, linear narratives of Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, The Bone Clocks is a return to the multiple perspectives and genre-spanning narratives of earlier works Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten. A lighthouse on a lone promontory above the waves a smashed clock face, inner workings exposed tape unspooling like ribbon from a cassette steps spiralling off into oblivion before you even open David Mitchell’s latest novel the dust-jacket reveals a little of the kaleidoscope of beautiful insanity you’ll find within its pages.

The bone clocks review