This week’s selection is the debut novel by one of my favourite contemporary writers, David Mitchell. Mitchell is probably now—after the recent release of the film—best known for his 2004 novelCloud Atlas. In a lot of ways, today’s book—Ghostwritten—is very similar to Cloud Atlas. It’s strange and lushly descriptive; it isn’t strictly a linear tale, following the events of a set group of characters from point A to point B; it is a segmented piece that in some ways reads more like a series of short stories, with loose but intriguing connections between them. So it’s similar—but that’s not to say Mitchell repeated himself when he wrote Cloud Atlas. It’s more that he defined a particular style of writing for himself and returned to an interesting theme. And it certainly is an interesting theme—or series of themes. Ghostwritten’s scope is massive. It covers plotlines such as terrorism and occultism in Okinawa, art thieving in St. Petersburg, and legal deception, fraud, and divorce in Hong Kong.Plus it weaves through all these stories the usual themes that are present at some point or another in our lives—love, death, betrayal, joy, fear, devotion, isolation.

Ghostwritten is a novel in nine parts and it’s a book that doesn’t necessarily need to be read cover to cover, though you’ll want to. Its strengths are in its minutiae (MI-NU-SHI-EE). The words themselves, the sentences,the paragraphs, the descriptions, the characters’ dialogue—it’s all so lovingly written that simply letting your eyes pass over the words and your mind drink them in is enough, and the greater story itself is somewhat insignificant. Or maybe I’m just saying that because it’s a hard book to describe. It beggars description in part because its scope is so big—the timeline cover generations and it travels the world—butalso because it’s a book that doesn’t always add up. It doesn’t always make sense, at least not in a traditional way. And some of the connections between the characters, well, they’re not all that great. Ghostwritten bewilders you when you immerse yourself in it. But immerse yourself, you will most certainly do, because Mitchell’s writing is crisp and pleasing to read—the pages flow by and whether or not you fully grasp what’s happening to the characters and what’s connecting the stories, you can’t keep yourself from dogging their footsteps…like a ghost.

That’s the other theme in this book that Mitchell explores. Ghosts. He plays with the idea, bringing it into the stories in both tangible—supernatural—ways, and metaphoric and intangible ways. Whispers of past lives, regrets, and strange unknowable connections between strangers are all explored in the pages of Ghostwritten. So are ghosts of the more standard, walking-through-doorsvariety.

I read a review of the book (in the Guardian) that touted David Mitchell’s approach to blending genres of fiction—sci-fi, thriller, literary, philosophic, etc.—as a new style in itself that may be the future of the modern novel. I don’t know that I agree entirely with that prediction but it did make me think—what is the future of the novel? What’s next? Whatever it is, I do agree thatGhostwrittencould very well be leading that movement.