Cloud Atlas is a book by David Mitchell. It has been adapted for film by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis and is scheduled for release on October 26, 2012. As ambitious as the Wachowskis past efforts have been, this is an even greater challenge. With a powerful cast that includes Tom Hanks, Hugh Grant, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, and Hugo Weaving, there won't be any excuse of poor acting bringing the film down.

The novel consists of six nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the nineteenth century to a distant, post-apocalyptic future. Each tale is revealed to be a story that is read (or observed) by the main character in the next. All stories but the last are interrupted at some moment, and after the sixth story concludes at the center of the book, the novel "goes back" in time, "closing" each story as the book progresses in terms of pages but regresses in terms of the historical period in which the action takes place. Eventually, readers end where they started, with Adam Ewing in the Pacific Ocean, circa 1850.