Keep your eyes peeled for a small black iron door. Down the road from a working-class British pub, along the brick wall of a narrow alley, if the conditions are exactly right, you’ll find the entrance to Slade House. A stranger will greet you by name and invite you inside. At first, you won’t want to leave. Later, you’ll find that you can’t. Every nine years, the house’s residents — an odd brother and sister — extend a unique invitation to someone who’s different or lonely: a precocious teenager, a recently divorced policeman, a shy college student. But what really goes on inside Slade House? For those who find out, it’s already too late... Spanning five decades, from the last days of the 1970s to the present, leaping genres, and barreling toward an astonishing conclusion, this intricately woven novel will pull you into a reality-warping new vision of the haunted house story—as only David Mitchell could imagine it.

Cloud atlas is a cleverly written book consisting of six seperate, but connecting stories set across six different periods in time. Each story has been chopped in two and symmetrically placed in the book so you don’t discover the conclusion to the first tale until the very end of the book. This layout effectively creates a storytelling ripple where the sixth and final story is told, as a whole, at the books central core, before the reader then moves back out in the direction they came to discover each of the other characters destiny’s.

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on moustache in That Mitchell and Webb Look, has written a book about his life. As well as giving a specific account of every single time he's scored some smack, this disgusting memoir also details: * the singular, pitbull-infested charm of the FRP ('Flat Roofed Pub') * the curious French habit of injecting everyone in the arse rather than the arm * why, by the time he got to Cambridge, he really, really needed a drink * the pain of being denied a childhood birthday party at McDonalds * the satisfaction of writing jokes about suicide * how doing quite a lot of walking around London helps with his sciatica * trying to pretend he isn't a total at Robert Webb's wedding * that he has fallen in love at LOT, but rarely done anything about it * why it would be worse to bump into Michael Palin than Hitler on holiday * that he's not David Mitchell the novelist. Despite what David Miliband might thinkReview'He can write' Evening Standard About the AuthorDavid recently completed filming the eighth series of the award winning and critically acclaimed "Peep Show". His memoir 'Back Story' is due for publication by Harper Collins on the 11th October. David will also be recording another series of The Unbelievable Truth this Autumn.

What's wrong with calling a burglar brave? Why are people so f***ing hung up about swearing? Why do the asterisks in that sentence make it okay? Why do so many people want to stop other people doing things, and how can they be stopped from stopping them? Why is every film and TV programme a sequel or a remake? Why are we so reliant on perpetual diversion that someone has created chocolate toothpaste? Is there anything to be done about the Internet?These and many other questions trouble David Mitchell as he delights us with a tour of the absurdities of modern life - from Ryanair to Downton Abbey, sports day to smoking, nuclear weapons to phone etiquette, UKIP to hotdogs made of cats. Funny, provocative and shot through with refreshing amounts of common sense,Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse celebrates and commiserates on the state of things in our not entirely glorious nation.