"Mere Mortals" by David Mitchell, summary

This book chronicles six decades of Holly Sykes’s life. The fate of a provincial English girl is inextricably intertwined with the fierce confrontation between two secret groups of immortal beings who drain gifted human souls to prolong their own youth and continually escape the inevitable physical grave. The work took four years. The author created the voluminous manuscript from 2011 to 2014, basing the plot on the gradual maturation and physical decline of the human body.

The text won the World Fantasy Prize. The jury of the prestigious World Fantasy Prize awarded the novel the top prize of 2015, and the British Booker Prize committee nominated it for the longlist.

The book is plot-related to the 2015 mystical novella "The Hunger House," which develops the theme of predatory souls.

Escape from Gravesend

In the summer of 1984, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes leaves her parents’ home in Gravesend after a heated argument with her mother over her older, married boyfriend. Her younger brother, Jacquot, hands the runaway a homemade cardboard maze. Before parting, he makes his sister swear to forever memorize every twist and turn of the ink-drawn passages. A double betrayal awaits her in her lover’s apartment. After catching him in bed with her best friend, Stella, Holly, in despair, walks away along the muddy banks of the Thames.

An elderly fisherwoman, Esther Little, sits by an old wooden dock. The stranger offers the fugitive some cold green tea, extracts her promise of shelter, and draws strange signs on the damp boards with chalk. A classmate, Ed Brubeck, appears along the way. The teenagers share a purchased portion of fried fish and chips on the windswept seashore, hide for the night from the deafening ringing of bells in the quiet sacristy of the ancient parish church of St. Mary’s, and peacefully go their separate ways the next morning.

An underground tunnel shatters the girl’s perception. Inside, the concrete corridor suddenly gives way to a diamond-shaped stone hall with an eyeless icon of a stern saint. The vision instantly dissipates. Random hitchhikers take the fugitive to a cozy cottage, where they are attacked by a sinister, black-haired stalker, Joseph Rimes, who brutally breaks the neck of the house’s owner in the pursuit of fugitive souls. With a sudden blow of a kitchen knife, the owner of the house destroys the monster. The touch of a terrified finger to the forehead of her dying savior erases the recent bloody massacre from the girl’s memory.

The farm offers a brief respite. Ed Brubeck, arriving on his bicycle, delivers terrible news: seven-year-old Jaco has disappeared without a trace from the house, which had been locked overnight.

Cambridge intrigues and the Swiss choice

In the gloomy chapel of King’s College, cynical Cambridge student Hugo Lamb accidentally encounters the enigmatic Swiss woman Immaculée Constantin, who engages in intriguing philosophical conversations about the immortal nature of power. His interlocutor temporarily plunges him into a deep stupor. Later, the charming student cleverly seduces someone else’s lover, steals stamps from a paralyzed general, and drives gambling debtor Johnny Penhaligon to suicide. The money starts flowing.

At a Swiss ski resort, a fugitive unexpectedly becomes close to a grown-up Holly Sykes. A sudden, genuine love, for the first time in years, gives the cynical manipulator a fragile hope for the saving peace of mind of a pure soul. By morning, the choice is made. Envoys of the secret order of Anchorites offer the Englishman eternal physical youth in exchange for complicity in the regular ritual murders of other people’s children. Afterward, Hugo leaves the sleeping girl forever and agrees to pass through a dimensional portal.

Brighton Troubles and Baghdad Shadows

In the spring of 2004, war reporter Ed Brubeck attends his sister Holly’s lavish Brighton wedding. His family life is falling apart. Dangerous assignments in Iraq, devastated by American bombing, are turning into an irresistible addiction for the journalist, eroding the fragile trust of his loved ones. Holly delivers a harsh ultimatum: he must either sever his lucrative contract with an American publication for the sake of his six-year-old daughter, Aoife, or pack his bags and leave his family forever.

A reporter’s memory continually returns to burning Baghdad. A monstrous car bomb explosion at the gates of the Safir Hotel claimed the lives of his loyal driver, Nasser, and photographer, Aziz. A heavy burden of guilt forces the correspondent to conceal the details of the tragedy. In the midst of a crowded seaside celebration, his young daughter suddenly disappears from her locked hotel room, plunging her parents into the chilling horror of a repeat of the long-ago, unsolved tragedy of the abduction of little Jaco.

A desperate search along the embankment yields no results. In the hotel lobby, Holly suddenly collapses and, in a hoarse, alien voice, utters mysterious numbers. The numbers indicate the number of a locked room on the tenth floor. After breaking down the locked door of the maintenance building, the terrified father discovers the girl sleeping peacefully, unharmed, amid construction bags and dust. Late that night, in a quiet room, the shocked man, for the first time, openly reveals to the woman he loves the bitter truth about his Iraqi nightmare and his own emotional weakness.

The Fall of a London Writer

British novelist Crispin Hershey suffers a painful creative slump after a scathing article by critic Richard Cheeseman. Revenge clouds his judgment. At a literary festival in Cartagena, Colombia, the author plants a packet of cocaine in the offender’s suitcase and anonymously reports the smuggling to customs. Cheeseman is sentenced to four long years in a brutal Bogotá prison.

The painful burden of his crime haunts the frightened author at international book festivals in Australia, China, and distant Iceland. Holly Sykes predicts a meeting with the one-eyed man. In December 2020, Cheeseman, released from prison with a patch over his injured eye, confronts Hershey in an American university office, holds the traitor at gunpoint, spares his enemy’s life, and leaves silently. The denouement comes instantly. The deranged poet Soleil Moore enters the deserted room and cold-bloodedly shoots the writer five times in the chest.

Showdown in the Twilight Chapel

In the spring of 2025, Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby receives a mysterious Norwegian package containing a tape recording of her deceased Australian colleague, Esther Little. The recording reveals a secret. A forty-year-old soul has hidden within Holly Sykes’s memory, a protected refuge from her enemies. A manhunt rages in New York City. Mercenaries attempt to deceive the defenseless writer, but she is saved through the direct psychic intervention of her loyal allies.

In a secret hideout, Marinus immerses himself in Holly’s memories. A solemn recitation of an ancient Aboriginal name, consisting of two hundred and seven parts, brings the dormant Australian soul back to life. The supposed defector Elijah D’Arnok volunteers to lead an armed detachment of humanity’s defenders through a shimmering dimensional portal directly to the enemy’s secret lair, in order to finally physically destroy the age-old source of evil.

A treacherous ambush awaits the guests within the Chapel of Darkness. Eleven immortal predators unleash a devastating barrage of deadly energy blasts and heavy objects upon the invading aliens. One by one, the brave defenders perish. Marinus’s body is crushed by a toppled oak table, forcing the explorer’s spirit to hastily migrate into Holly. The freed Esther Little sacrifices her own immortal essence to catastrophically widen the fatal crack in the sanctuary’s monolithic stone vault.

The crumbling walls let in an all-consuming primordial darkness. Centuries-old soul-devourers perish in panic under the heavy stone rubble of the collapsing roof. The fugitives rush forward through the darkness. The woman, who has caught up with them, cold-bloodedly beats the cruel Constantine to death with a heavy marble rolling pin right at the intersection of the corridors. A shining golden apple returns the heroine to New York.

Atlantic Haven on the Edge of an Era

In the autumn of 2043, seventy-four-year-old Holly Sykes lives in a remote seaside cottage on the Sheepshead Peninsula in Ireland. Human civilization is collapsing. Energy depletion, climate catastrophes, and the accident of a British nuclear reactor have ushered in an era of lawlessness, forcing people to abandon all sense of law and mercy. She is raising her orphaned granddaughter, Lorelei, and an adopted Moroccan boy, Rafik, who suffers from diabetes.

The sudden departure of the Chinese concession company deprives the entire West Cork coast of the last vestiges of order and regular supplies of vital medicine. Armed bandits forcibly seize solar panels. An Icelandic naval patrol ship, commanded by the reborn Marinus, unexpectedly drops anchor in the bay, having arrived to urgently evacuate a young Icelandic citizen, Lorelei, to the lush geothermal safety of a prosperous northern island nation. The grandmother begs for Rafik’s life. Through persuasion, Marinus compels the naval officers to take the sick boy on board, leaving Holly to escort the motorboat off into the darkness.