THE BONE CLOCKS by David Mitchell

Holly Sykes is 15 years old, possibly pregnant, and running away from home to live with her 20-something boyfriend.  Unfortunately, he’s now sleeping with her best friend.  Holly heads to a strawberry farm to get work, but along the way she has some strange encounters, possibly reminiscent of the “radio people” who once inhabited her mind.  Then we leave Holly’s teenage story to hear from a series of other narrators, but Holly is the thread that binds them all together.  The other narrators include a self-important author, an immortal being, a journalist, and—my personal favorite—Hugo Lamb, who falls in love with a grown-up Holly but then falls more in love with the prospect of immortality.  I kept hoping that he would wise up and rejoin the natural world, as opposed to the supernatural world, but, alas, we don’t hear from him again until the climactic battle of atemperals between the Anchorites and the Horologists, which I found to be a little hokey.  It was a bit too much like the battle in Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, a book which I didn’t particularly care for.  My absolute favorite section of the book is the last section, in which Holly faces unforeseen challenges, unrelated to her adventures alongside immortals with super powers.  This author likes to resurrect his characters in subsequent novels, and I’m hoping to meet Hugo Lamb again, even though he apparently had a bit part in Black Swan Green, which I have not read.  If Marinus can appear in three of David Mitchell’s novels, then I can only hope that Hugo will make a third appearance as well.