Cloud Cuckoo Land
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4.3 • 183 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
‘A dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books’ Guardian
‘There is magic in this place … You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you’
Fifteenth-century Constantinople. Present day Idaho. The future, and humanity’s last hope.
Across time and space, five young dreamers are bound by a single ancient text. Together, they tell a story of a world in peril; of the power of words, of resilience, and of hope against all odds.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See returns with a heart-breaking, magnificent epic of human connection and a love letter to storytelling itself.
‘Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages’ Observer
‘Ingenious, hopeful and totally absorbing’ Financial Times
‘This engagingly written, big-hearted book is a must-read’ Daily Mirror
Reviews
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
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Following his huge success with All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr creates a very different, but deeply moving story of love, loss and a reflection on our profound connection to the earth and our impact on it. Different storylines and characters—spanning centuries and continents—are tied together by their connection to the same text, and as the stories unfold and criss-cross each other, we see the characters all respond to this ancient story from the perspective of their own experiences and finding solace and hope in it. Doerr’s beautiful writing carries the reader through the book’s unusual structure and ultimately weaves the stories together in an unexpected and powerfully moving conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer winner Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See) returns with a deeply affecting epic of a long-lost book from ancient Greece. In the mid-22nd century, Konstance, 14, copies an English translation of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes with her food printer's Nourish powder while aboard the Argos, an ark-like spaceship destined for a habitable planet. She found the book in the Argos's library, and was already familiar with Diogenes's story of a shepherd named Aethon and his search for a book that told of all the world's unknown lands, because her father told it to her while they tended the Argos's farm. Her father's connection to the Diogenes book is gradually revealed, but first Doerr takes the reader farther back in time. In chapters set in and around Constantinople leading up to the 1453 siege, two 13-year-old children, Anna and Omeir, converge while fleeing the city, and Omeir helps Anna protect a codex of Cloud Cuckoo Land she discovered in a monastery. Then, in 2020 Lakeport, Idaho, translator Zeno Ninis collaborates with a group of young children on a stage production of Cloud Cuckoo Land at the library, where a teenage ecoterrorist has planted a bomb meant to target the neighboring real estate office. Doerr seamlessly shuffles each of these narratives in vignettes that keep the action in full flow and the reader turning the pages. The descriptions of Constantinople, Idaho, and the Argos are each distinct and fully realized, and the protagonists of each are united by a determination to survive and a hunger for stories, which in Doerr's universe provide the greatest nourishment. This is a marvel.
Customer Reviews
Didn’t finish
I made it a third of the way through. It’s well written and interesting but just so loooong. I can’t commit to that much book unless it really grabs me and this didn’t. It has multiple characters across multiple timelines all held together by an ancient story (hence the title). I think I will come back to this at some point as it is beautifully written. I’m just not in the right head space at the moment.
Loved this book
What a great read.
The most beautiful story
Wow. Not since A Little Life have I read a book that I couldn’t stop thinking about when I shut the cover, to the point where I dreamt about it multiple times. What an insanely beautiful story about resilience, family, love and the power of storytelling told through the eyes of five individuals that span from Ancient Greece to a space shuttle in the mid 22nd century ❤️ and just like A Little Life, I’m going to read this again (and most likely again and again) and love it that little bit more every time I do.