The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction,[not verified in body] with interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai'i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Rather than being a reference to the cloud atlases used in meteorology,[not verified in body] Mitchell has stated that the title and the book address reincarnation and the universality of human nature, with the title referring to a changing landscape (a "cloud") over manifestations of fixed human nature (the "atlas").