Cloud Cuckoo Land

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story of resilience, hope – and a book. Bound together by a single ancient text, the unforgettable characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land are dreamers and outsiders figuring out the world around them: thirteen-year-old Anna and Omeir, an orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and octogenarian Zeno in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, decades from now, who turns to the oldest stories to guide her community in peril.

Doerr has created a tapestry of times and places that reflects our own vast interconnectedness – with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us and those who will be here after we’re gone. Dedicated to ‘the librarians then, now, and in the years to come’, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship – of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.

Praise for Cloud Cuckoo Land:

‘Sets him comfortably alongside Tolkien, Rowling and David Mitchell, and he is a much more elegant writer than two of those … Cloud Cuckoo Land is an impressive achievement and a joy to read. Serious novels are rarely this fun.’ The Times

‘There is a kind of book a seasoned writer produces after a big success: large-hearted, wide in scope and joyous. Following his Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel’ Guardian

‘A paean to stories as a source of sustenance and solace, and to the sweetness of our shared terrestrial home, Doerr’s narrative is buoyant with humanity and it’s author’s palpable pleasure in invention’ Daily Mail

‘A humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences. Cloud Cuckoo Land is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading’ New York Times

‘Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fascinatingly ambitious tale that’s worth the seven year wait’ Stylist

‘Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr’s new novel traverses time and space, unifying his characters through a text written by Diogenes in the first century AD. Cloud Cuckoo Land begins there and sweeps through the millennia in a huge, imaginative arc that celebrates the outsiders, the writers and the keepers of books. An ultimately hopeful and life-affirming novel about the essence of love, literature and art’ Irish Independent

‘This is a dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books – one for David Mitchell fans’ Guardian

‘Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages’ Observer

Anthony Doerr’s published his first book, ‘The Shell Collector’, a collection of short stories in 2002. He is 32 and lives in Idaho, where he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Boise State University.

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