Cloud Atlas is David Mitchell's third novel. The book consists of six stories, starting with the diary of an American traveling from Sydney to San Francisco in 1840, a young composer living in Belgium in the early 1930s, a young journalist involved in the California disaster in 1975, a gangster who publishes his memoirs in London today, a story in Korea in 1984, and an old man narrating his youthful self-talk in Hawaii at that time. Cloud Atlas was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize.