I....
what?

I am incapable of giving a David Mitchell book fewer than four stars, but I can see how for some people this might be closer to a three. This felt like Mitchell had some unfinished business with Cloud Atlas and so wrote this 500+ page beast as a way of getting at it.

Utterly enjoyable characters, even the awful ones...mostly. And even if

Spoiler

the Hugo Lamb character felt like "Well, what if Robert Frobisher was a psychopathic vampire?" And Crispin Hershey felt a lot like that old bitter book editor also from Cloud Atlas.

I counted multiple references/callbacks to at least three other Mitchell books. Either Mitchell is getting far, far too wink-y or he is working on some epically long game. I would love that to be true, by the way, but I doubt it is.