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Available in hardcover at National Bookstores, Php1049

We were not expecting a new David Mitchell novel so soon after The Bone Clocks, so when our friend pointed to the good-looking volume with the cut-out cover, we almost did not associate it with one of our favourite authors. Yesterday we made the same mistake we always make with Mitchell’s books: we picked it up for a quick nosh, and when we looked up from the last page, three hours had passed. His fiction has time-dilating properties, which are especially appropriate to a short novel about Atemporals.

Yes, Atemporals, the antagonists of The Bone Clocks, who eat souls in order to prolong their lives. It’s a great haunted house yarn with interlocking plots involving many characters in different time periods—like Cloud Atlas—and the latest incarnation of a certain individual who turned up in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks. Bone clocks are human beings—bags of blood subject to the depredations of Time. Critics are bitching about whether this is literature at all, or complaining that the author has lost his way and gotten sucked up into the genre black hole. Screw that. This is a book for people who insist that reading should be fun.

If you have not read Mitchell’s other novels, will you enjoy this? Yes. It’s a fast and spirited introduction to his work, and we envy you the thrill of reading Mitchell for the first time.