The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

Teenage runaway Holly Sykes has some strange and violent encounters with otherworldly beings in rural Kent in the 1980s. She returns home to her parents’ pub when her strange little brother, Jacko, disappears. Seven years later, sociopath Cambridge student Hugo Lang finds his double life as perfect son and student versus fraudulent card sharp is about to unravel. On a ski trip to Switzerland, his encounter with hard working bar manager Holly takes his life in a very different direction, or perhaps to a different plane. Another decade on, war correspondent Ed Brubeck is struggling with PTSD and an addiction to his work and the impact it has on his partner, Holly, and their child. When their daughter goes missing old forces from Holly’s past are reactivated to find her. All this takes to half way through the book and so far, so intriguing. Then we hit 2015 and Crispin Hershey, an ageing, fading writer who encounters Holly on the writers’ festival circuit. He is a tedious character who dominates the next chunk of the novel, to its detriment. His section is actually no longer than the others but is so dull to read that it seems triple the length. Eventually we hit 2025, and the ultimate showdown between those mysterious otherworldly beings – the Horologists and the Anchorites, who have been at war for centuries. But not before we digress into the past lives of Marinus, one of the Horologists, just to spin the tale out even longer. Finally Holly retakes the central narrative in post-apocalypse 2043, where she is barely surviving in rural Ireland with her grandchildren. Mitchell’s books are difficult to describe because they contain such a dense concentration of worlds within worlds. This one is an epic self-indulgent ramble over more than 600 pages. Holly is a compelling protagonist; elements of the tale are entertaining; but it’s all too much and it’s a relief to finally get to the unlikely ending.