What connects the member of the murderous Japanese sect with the record seller in Tokyo and the English lawyer in Hong Kong? The old Chinese woman with the hall keeper from St. Petersburg and the drummer from London? The Irish nuclear physicist with the New York radio host and the Mongolian actors? The Ghostwriters is a spiritual adventure novel, a series of strange episodes, each of which has its own exciting story and background drawn in vivid images. Or is it all just appearances? It slowly turns out that the real protagonist is a wandering spirit who moves into the souls of those who enter the stage, who perhaps controls their actions, perhaps just a chronicler of what happened to them. Is it a coincidence in whom the ghost appears, and is it a coincidence what the characters do and when? And when the chain of coincidences is unleashed, does he have the power to stop the events? Is the result creation or destruction?
One of the most famous figures in contemporary British literature, the author of the cult hit Cloud Atlas, seeks answers to all these questions. David Mitchell is by no means a ghostwriter: he is a master of story management and special writing language, complex narrative structures. In his novels, the sophistication of the structure and the complexity of the relationship system are not for their own sake, nor are they merely a set piece; his basic writer's thesis is that everything is connected to everything else - chance and fate connect us all.