Set in Alaska in the waning days of World War II, The Cloud Atlas is an enthralling debut novel, a story of adventure and awakening--and of a young soldier who came to Alaska on an extraordinary top-secret mission...and found a world that would haunt him forever. Drifting through the night, whisper-quiet, they were the most sublime manifestations of a desperate enemy: Japanese balloon bombs. Sergeant Louis Belk, age eighteen, was one of the men sent to Alaska to find and dispose of these weapons--and then keep them secret from an already anxious public. But the mysteries confronting the young sergeant only increase when he meets his superior officer--a brutal veteran OSS spy hunter who knows all too well what the balloons can do--and a beautiful Yup'ik Eskimo woman who claims she can see the future. Chasing after the ghostly floating weapons, Louis embarks upon an adventure that will lead him deep into the vast tundra to a discovery and a choice that will change the course of his life.