David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (Random House) is divided into six intricately developed novellas each focusing on a decade of his protagonist Holly Sykes' life. He starts in 1984 and brings us to 2040, when Holly, mortal as we are, is an old woman. Mitchell is reflecting on mortality in a world (ours) which doesn't much smile upon age. But one of his objects is surely the construction of an alternate world; his greatest challenge, he says, was in the slow reveal.