This is David Mitchell's debut novel, and third by him I have read, my God that's a clumsy sentence construction, and it has very much elevated me from a liker of his work to a bit of a fan. With a structure only a little less ambitious than that of the later Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten is nine stories, interlinked, that span the globe, mapping human folly and endeavour and nobility through ghost stories, love stories, science fiction, noir and the travelogues of the disembodied. It all ends in a short, tenth chapter in which everything we have come to know seems crowded into a small space by the random vagaries of chance and the incomprehensible subatomic glue of physics, terrifyingly vulnerable and possibly doomed but carrying on regardless.