Cloud Diary

• Cloud Diary
• Price: $18.00
• Fiction
• Pages - 275
• 978-1-936196-85-2
• PUBLISHED MAY 2018

When a relationship crumbles due to tragedy, what remains?

In the world lovers create for themselves, it’s the simple images and quiet gestures that linger in memory. A silent moment together on a bench, a hand loose upon a table, a voice carried across a crowded room.

Doug is quiet and aimless when he meets Sophie, an extravagant, excitable artist. They live together on box wine, ramen and peanut butter until their world is fractured by violence. Eight years later, they rediscover each other as Sophie approaches a startling decision.
Cloud Diary is Doug’s story about Sophie and the shattering, transformative nature of intimacy. In considering the ways our histories can both scar and rescue us, it reminds us that the past is never simply the past.

HYPE

“A delightful and accomplished novel. Cloud Diary is a winning blend of metaphysics and box wine, of sticky-floored dive bars and lofty artistic passions. Steve Mitchell renders love and mortality with precision and without sentimentality. Nuanced and compassionate, Cloud Diary is a tribute to the ever presence of the past, and how it might help us become whole.”

–Michael Parker, author of The Watery Part of the World, Everything Then and Since

“A beautiful, bittersweet novel about first love—how it forms us, how it settles in us and lingers, consoling us even to the end of our days.”

–Kim Church, author of Byrd

“With his spare, delicate sentences and poignant observations, Steve Mitchell takes us deep into his characters, and, in turn, into ourselves—into our own past loves and romantic longings. This story of Doug and Sophie is more than just the experience of being in love—it’s about the deep roots and long tendrils that love can leave for all of us. “Cloud Diary” is a powerful story that is both beautifully crafted and deeply felt.”

–Francis Badgett, editor of Contrary Magazine

REVIEWS

Greensboro Review says, “Cloud Diary” is a book that will stay with you.” See the rest of the article here.