Good to hear that you enjoyed Cloud Atlas, Monty 
Here is the Cloud Atlas thread that Satsuki was talking about. Take a look and feel free to add to it. I'd love to hear your thoughts.
David Mitchell writes beautifully and his other books are way above average, too, but Cloud Atlas is his best. Bone Clocks is incredibly similar to Cloud Atlas (both in format and content) to the extent where I wondered what the point of writing it was - he already said all that much better in CA.
The similarities between Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks are quite extensive, to the point that the latter feels like an imitation of the former:
Both books feature:
- 6 stories
- ... all of which are first-person accounts
- ... spanning decades
- ... starting in the past (1984) and extending far in the future (2043)
- ... and ending on a roll rather than winding down, as if they were cut prematurely
The themes are similar, too:
- Man's selfishness & cruelty, especially towards each other
- The yearning for safeguarding our knowledge/self/experiences for posterity
- Growing old
- Dystopian future
Cloud Atlas was original, gripping, and well... perfect smile First halves of the stories marched towards an inevitable conclusion, with the dystopian and post-apocalyptic two feeling incredibly real. Then came the second halves, and the reader is locked into the epic ensemble, with no escape from the author's logic as shown over and over in a variety of ways across continents and centuries. People are cruel and exploitive, we kill and enslave when we can; we have not changed, will never change, and this will be our downfall. Our technology will disappear in a single generation, just like our experiences and memories do as we grow old and die. It is a powerful blow to the gut, made all the more painful because of the hopeful note it ends with (1st story, so 1850s... but the reader already knows how the human story will end sad because the last story was laid out in full in the middle of the book).
A similar theme plays out in The Bone Clocks in a very similar format, but in a less effective way imho and for it I blame its fantastical/supernatural subplot of warring immortals.
I'm not quite sure why the author has felt the need for this subplot, especially since it takes up almost 25% of the book and imho doesn't add much to it, while the other 5 narratives take up between 14%-17%.