Where to start with David Mitchell

British novelist, born 1969.

Best David Mitchell book to start with: Cloud Atlas (2004), on 5 of the 16 lists it could have made.

Cloud Atlas, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004, is the book that shows what Mitchell can do, so begin there. It is six stories nested one inside another, each in a different style, running forward in time and then back. The structure looks forbidding but reads easily, because every story has its own pull. Stay with the first, a 19th-century sea journal, which is the slowest.

Black Swan Green is the plainest of his books and a good place to start if you prefer realism. It follows a thirteen-year-old boy in rural Worcestershire in 1982 through a year at school, and it was shortlisted for the Costa in 2006. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize in 2011, is a historical novel set in a Dutch trading post in Japan around 1800, and it is the most conventional of his big books.

number9dream, shortlisted for the Booker in 2001, is the strangest, a Tokyo story that drifts between dream and reality, and it makes more sense once you know how he handles the other books.