Document Details

It consists of six interrelated and interwoven stories spanning different time periods. According to novelist David Mitchell, it is structured "as a sort of pointillist mosaic."

Pacific Islands, 1849
Adam Ewing, an American lawyer from San Francisco, has come to the Chatham Islands to conclude a business arrangement with Reverend Gilles Horrox for his father-in-law, Haskell Moore. He witnesses the whipping of a Moriori slave, Autua, who later stows away on the ship. Autua confronts Ewing and convinces him to advocate for him to join the crew as a free man. Meanwhile, Dr Henry Goose slowly poisons Ewing, claiming it to be the cure for a parasitic worm, aiming to steal Ewing's valuables. When Goose attempts to administer the fatal dose, Autua saves Ewing. Returning to the United States, Ewing and his wife Tilda denounce her father's complicity in slavery and leave San Francisco to join the abolition movement.

Cambridge/Edinburgh, 1936
Robert Frobisher, a bisexual English composer, finds work as an amanuensis, a person employed to write what another dictates, to aging composer Vyvyan Ayrs, allowing Frobisher the time and inspiration to compose his own masterpiece, "My Cloud Atlas Sextet." While working for Ayrs, Frobisher begins reading the published chronicle of Ewing's journal, which he has found among the many books at Ayrs's mansion. He never finishes the journal and notes in a letter that "A half-finished book is, after all, a half-finished love affair." When "My Cloud Atlas Sextet" is revealed to Ayrs, he wishes to take credit for Frobisher's work, claiming it is the result of their collaboration and threatens to expose his scandalous background if he resists. Frobisher accidentally shoots and wounds Ayrs and flees to a hotel, where he uses the name "Ewing." Perhaps spurred by his inability to complete Ewing's book, he finishes "My Cloud Atlas Sextet", then commits suicide just before his lover Rufus Sixsmith arrives.

San Francisco, 1973
Journalist Luisa Rey meets an older Rufus Sixsmith, now a nuclear physicist. Sixsmith tips off Rey to a conspiracy regarding the safety of a new nuclear reactor run by Lloyd Hooks, but is killed by Hooks' hitman Bill Smoke before he can give her a report that proves it. Rey finds and reads Frobisher's letters to Sixsmith, resulting in her tracking down a vinyl recording of Frobisher's "My Cloud Atlas Sextet". Isaac Sachs, another scientist at the power plant, passes her a copy of Sixsmith's report. However, Smoke kills Sachs by blowing up the plane in which he is flying, and later runs Rey's car off a bridge. Although she escapes, the report is destroyed. With help from the plant's head of security, Joe Napier, who knew her father, she evades another attempt on her life, which results in Smoke's death. With another copy of the report she exposes the plot to use a nuclear accident for the benefit of oil companies.

London, 2012
65-year-old publisher Timothy Cavendish reaps a windfall when Dermot Hoggins, the gangster author of Knuckle Sandwich, publicly murders a critic who gave the novel a harsh review. When Hoggins' brothers threaten Cavendish's life to get his share of the profits, Cavendish asks for help from his wealthy brother Denholme. Denholme sends him to a location to hide, a place called Aurora House. On the way there, Cavendish reads a manuscript of a novel based on Luisa Rey's story. And he recalls a relationship he had with a woman named Ursula, when they were both younger. He visits the house where she lived with her parents, discovering that she still lives there and is much older. Believing Aurora House is a hotel, Timothy signs papers "voluntarily" committing himself, revealing Aurora House to be a nursing home (in Ayrs' old mansion). Denholme confessed to Timothy that he sent him there, to avenge an old affair with Denholme's wife Georgette. At Aurora House the head nurse, Noakes, is abusive and contact with the outside world is denied. Plotting with three other residents, Cavendish escapes and goes on to write a screenplay of his story.

Neo Seoul, 2144
Sonmi~451 is a genetically-engineered fabricant, a human clone and slave worker, living a compliant life of servitude as a server at a fast food restaurant. She recounts her memories before an interviewer, an archivist whose purpose is to document her thoughts and story for the future. Sonmi begins by recounting a day in the life of a fabricant like herself. She tells how she was exposed to ideas of rebellion and liberation (based on Cavendish's adventures), and how she was rescued from captivity by Commander Hae-Joo Chang, a member of a rebel movement known as "Union". He smuggles her to a residence in Neo Seoul where he exposes Sonmi to the larger world, including the banned writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a film version of Timothy Cavendish's "ghastly ordeal". They are found and Sonmi is captured. Hae-Joo rescues her, introduces her to the leader of the rebel movement, then shows her that fabricants are not freed at the end of their contract as they are told, but are killed and recycled into food for other clones. She decides that the system of society based on slavery and exploitation is intolerable, and makes a public broadcast of her story and manifesto. The authorities intervene within eighteen minutes to halt the broadcast and Hae-Joo is killed in the resulting firefight, Sonmi is captured. After telling her story to the archivist, she is executed.

Big Isle (Hawaii), 106 winters after The Fall
Zachry lives in a primitive society called "The Valley" on the Big Island of Hawaii after most of humanity has died during "The Fall", a largely-unexplained apocalyptic event. The Valley tribesmen speak a pidgin form of English,[18][19] and worship a goddess called Sonmi (Sonmi~451), their sacred text taken from the broadcast of her manifesto. Zachry is plagued by visions of a demonic figure called "Old Georgie", who attempts to manipulate him into giving in to his fears. One day, Zachry, his brother-in-law Adam and his nephew are attacked by the cannibalistic Kona tribe. Zachry runs into hiding and, taunted by "Georgie" and paralyzed by fear, watches in horror as his companions are murdered. His village is visited by Meronym, a member of the "Prescients", an advanced society still using the last remnants of technology. Her mission is to find a remote communication station on Mauna Sol and send a message to Earth's off-world colonies. Catkin, Zachry's niece, falls sick, and in exchange for saving her Zachry agrees to guide Meronym into the mountains to find the station. At the station, Meronym reveals that Sonmi was not a deity as the Valley tribe believes, but a human who died long ago. After returning, Zachry finds his tribe dead, slaughtered by the Kona. He kills the sleeping Kona chief and rescues Catkin, and Meronym saves them both from an assault by the returning Kona. Zachry and Catkin join Meronym and the Prescients as their ship leaves Big Island.

Prologue / Epilogue
A seventh time period, several decades after the events on Big Island, is featured in the film's prologue and epilogue: Zachry is revealed to have been telling these stories to his grandchildren on a beach near a city on an extraterrestrial Earth colony. The epilogue also confirms that Meronym succeeded in sending the message and traveled to the off-world colony where she lives with Zachry.