Books like Cloud Atlas
What should you read after David Mitchell’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- David Mitchell
- 2004
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Cloud Atlas
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchLife After Life
Kate Atkinson
Ursula Todd dies and restarts her twentieth century over and over. Atkinson gets the same effect Mitchell does — one soul refracted through history — with a warmer, more human touch.
- Lives echoing across centuries
- Structure as the whole point
- Historical pastiche done convincingly
- One protagonist, one country
Best for more of exactly thisThe Bone Clocks
David Mitchell
Mitchell doing Mitchell again: six sections, six voices, sixty years, and characters wandering in from his other novels as though the whole shelf were one book.
- Six stories nested like dolls
- A different voice in every section
- Lives echoing across centuries
- Middle section is a fantasy war
Worth a look — with a warningIf on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino
Ten novels, each broken off at the good bit, with you as the character trying to finish them. The interruption trick Mitchell borrowed, performed by the man who invented it.
- Six stories nested like dolls
- A different voice in every section
- Structure as the whole point
- No resolution to any strand
Great matchThe Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
For the reader who came out of Cloud Atlas holding onto the idea of two people finding each other again and again out of chronological order. Same ache, much more romance.
- Lives echoing across centuries
- Structure as the whole point
- Six stories nested like dolls
- Straight romance at heart
Best for a novel inside a novelThe Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Bulgakov runs first-century Jerusalem and 1930s Moscow in the same book, each commenting on the other, with the devil doing stage magic in between. The nesting instinct, gloriously unhinged.
- Documents found by later readers
- A different voice in every section
- Historical pastiche done convincingly
- Absurdist comedy throughout
Worth a look — with a warning1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Two narratives converging across a year in a Tokyo that has quietly gained a second moon, with a manuscript at the centre of everything. Enormous, hypnotic, and undisciplined.
- Documents found by later readers
- Structure as the whole point
- Six stories nested like dolls
- Well over nine hundred pages
Worth a look — with a warningInvisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Marco Polo describing fifty-five imaginary cities to Kublai Khan, arranged in a pattern that is the whole meaning. Read it for the architecture, not for anyone to care about.
- Structure as the whole point
- A different voice in every section
- Six stories nested like dolls
- No plot and no characters
Best for the strands quietly connectingStation Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Mandel scatters her people across twenty years and a pandemic, and the pleasure is exactly Mitchell's: noticing an object from one strand turn up, changed, in another.
- Lives echoing across centuries
- Documents found by later readers
- Structure as the whole point
- One voice throughout
Great matchThe Man Who Was Thursday
G. K. Chesterton
A detective story that keeps turning into a different book every two chapters until it becomes something close to theology. Genre-hopping as an act of mischief.
- A different voice in every section
- Structure as the whole point
- Historical pastiche done convincingly
- Edwardian prose and attitudes
Best for time refusing to behaveSlaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time and the novel comes unstuck with him, cutting between Dresden, a suburb and an alien zoo. Mitchell's fragmentation, at a third of the length.
- Structure as the whole point
- The strong eating the weak
- Lives echoing across centuries
- One protagonist throughout
Great matchMidnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
A life told as a manuscript being written and interrupted, with a nation's history folded into one body. Rushdie shares Mitchell's appetite for pastiche and for enormous scope.
- Documents found by later readers
- Historical pastiche done convincingly
- A different voice in every section
- Dense with Indian history
Best for a document that changes its readerA Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki
A woman finds a Tokyo schoolgirl's diary washed up in British Columbia, and the two lives start bending toward each other. Mitchell's found-manuscript conceit, done with real tenderness.
- Documents found by later readers
- Lives echoing across centuries
- A different voice in every section
- Only two strands
Great matchThe Overstory
Richard Powers
Nine separate lives, told one at a time, which slowly turn out to be branches of a single story about what people do to the living world. Cloud Atlas's shape, with trees.
- The strong eating the weak
- Six stories nested like dolls
- Lives echoing across centuries
- Preachy in the final third
What should you read after Cloud Atlas?
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Life After Life by Kate Atkinson — ursula Todd dies and restarts her twentieth century over and over. Atkinson gets the same effect Mitchell does — one soul refracted through history — with a warmer, more human touch.
If what stayed with you was six stories nested like dolls, read The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell instead: mitchell doing Mitchell again: six sections, six voices, sixty years, and characters wandering in from his other novels as though the whole shelf were one book. If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino is the other strong option — ten novels, each broken off at the good bit, with you as the character trying to finish them. The interruption trick Mitchell borrowed, performed by the man who invented it.
Loved something else?
Start from any book and we’ll build the list around your reasons.
Find my next book →NextBook is a participant in the Amazon Associates Program. We earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. It doesn’t affect which books we recommend or how we rank them.
More “what to read next” lists
- Books like 1984
- Books like 2312
- Books like A Clockwork Orange
- Books like A Darker Shade of Magic
- Books like A Gentleman in Moscow
- Books like A Little Life
- Books like A Man Called Ove
- Books like A Memory Called Empire
- Books like A Wrinkle in Time
- Books like All Systems Red
- Books like All the Bright Places
- Books like Altered Carbon