Description

Cloud Cuckoo Land follows three storylines: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now. A single copy of an ancient text—the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land—provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and misfits struggling to survive and finding resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril.

From Anthony Doerr: The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation. I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope, so I tried to create a tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with the ones who lived before us, and the ones who will be here after we’re gone. Along the way, Cloud Cuckoo Land became a paean to libraries large and small, and to our species’ extraordinary capacity to transmit stories from generation to generation