In retrospect, the clues were always there – that remarkable central sequence of Cloud Atlas narrated entirely in an invented future tongue; the moment when The Bone Clocks mutates from the story of a lovelorn adolescent girl into something nightmarishly strange – but the truth is now undeniable. With the publication of his seventh novel, Slade House, David Mitchell has outed himself as a full-on science-fiction writer – or, at the very least, as a frequent and enthusiastic practitioner of the form. Certainly, had this book been written by another, less-feted hand,

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