Six stories nested inside each other like a set of dolls. A lawyer crossing the Pacific in 1850. A broke young composer in Belgium in 1931 conning his way into an old master’s house. A reporter in 1970s California chasing a nuclear plant cover-up. A London publisher in the present, locked in a nursing home against his will. A cloned server in a corporate future Korea. And at the center, a goatherd on Hawaii after the world has fallen apart, talking in a language that has broken down with it. Mitchell cuts each one off mid-sentence, runs to the middle, then comes back and finishes them in reverse. Every story turns up as an artifact in the next one — a journal, a bundle of letters, a movie. The whole thing is about power and who eats whom. And FYI, the movie was horrible; the book is amazing.