Characters and themes from Mr. Mitchell’s previous books also recur here — hints, Mr. Mitchell has suggested, that all his novels somehow link together in a kind of “uberbook” — though, at this point, these reverberations and cross-references tend to feel more like clever high jinks than like the articulation of a genuine fictional universe.

“Ghostwritten” featured stream-of-consciousness monologues by an array of characters in far-flung locations whose stories intersect or converge. “Cloud Atlas” gave us half a dozen characters over several centuries whose stories nestle one inside the next, and who may or may not be reincarnations of one another. And “The Bone Clocks” breaks Holly’s life into six sections, told from her point of view, and from the perspectives of people who play important roles in her life.

The first takes place in 1984, when the 15-year-old Holly — who’s had strange episodes of hearing voices in her head — runs away from home and learns that her beloved little brother, Jacko, has disappeared. The second is in 1991, when a deeply cynical Cambridge student named Hugo Lamb (whom we met in the author’s 2006 novel, “Black Swan Green”) falls in love with Holly, who is working as a bartender at a ski resort in the Alps.

The third is in 2004, when the war reporter Ed Brubeck — Holly’s partner (and the father of her daughter, Aoife) — tells her that he’s planning to leave them again to go back to Iraq. The fourth is in 2015, when Holly, now the best-selling author of a memoir about her paranormal experiences, becomes friends with Crispin Hershey, a middle-aged novelist who has exacted cruel vengeance on another writer who gave him a bad review.

Image David Mitchell Credit... Eoin O'Conaill for The New York Times

The last two sections take a giant leap from a more or less recognizable world into the genres of fantasy and dystopian fiction. Section 5 takes place in 2025, when Holly gets caught up in a war between two groups of semi-immortals — good guys known as Atemporals of Horology, who live in an involuntary “spiral of resurrections,” being reincarnated again and again in different bodies; and bad guys, known as Anchorites, who defy death in vampire-like fashion by killing people (ideally children) and imbibing their souls.