Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's best-selling Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel which was also one of Richard & Judy's 100 Books of the Decade, has now been adapted for film. The major motion picture, directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, stars Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon, Jim Sturgess, Ben Whishaw, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Doona Bae, James D'Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David, and Hugh Grant.

The novel features six characters in interlocking stories, each interrupting the one before it: a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan's California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified dinery server on death row; and Zachry, a young Pacific islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation.

The narrators of Cloud Atlas hear one another's echoes down the corridor of history and their destinies are changed in ways great and small.

Mitchell's other novels are Ghostwritten, Number9Dream, Black Swan Green and The Thousand Autums of Jacob de Zoet, all published by Sceptre.