David Mitchell - Ghostwritten

Feels like something of a dry run for Cloud Atlas - less fully developed than that later effort, but sharing elements of its structure and method of developing its thematic concerns and, crucially, its storytelling flair. Mitchell whips from milieu to milieu, inhabiting (the choice of words is deliberate) character upon character, including some very non-traditional subjects (two of them outright non-corporeal). Motifs recur; ideas are recapitulated and spun from an array of different perspectives. An impressive feat, and all the more so for a first novel.