Summary of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

A high-quality summary of Anthony Doerr´s book Cloud Cuckoo Land, including chapter details and an analysis of the main themes of the original book.

About the original book:

Anthony Doerr's gorgeous third novel, set in fifteenth-century Constantinople, a small town in present-day Idaho, and on interstellar ship decades from now, is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in perilous worlds who find resilience, hope—and a book. Doerr has constructed a stunning tapestry of eras and places in Cloud Cuckoo Land that depicts our great interconnectedness—with other species, each other, those who came before us, and those who will come after us.

Anna, a thirteen-year-old orphan, lives in a home of women who earn a living embroidering priests' vestments inside Constantinople's strong walls. Anna learns to read because she is restless and insatiably curious, and in this old city known for its libraries, she reads a book about Aethon, a man who wishes to be transformed into a bird so that he might soar to a utopian paradise in the skies. As the walls of the only place she has ever known are shelled during the historic siege of Constantinople, she reads this to her ill sister. Omeir, a country lad far from home, has been forced into the invading army alongside his beloved oxen. His and Anna's paths will intersect.

Five hundred years later, in an Idaho library, octogenarian Zeno, who studied Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five youngsters in a theatrical version of Aethon's narrative, which has survived the decades despite all chances. A bomb has been planted amid the library shelves by Seymour, a disturbed, idealistic adolescent. Another siege has begun. Konstance is alone in a vault on the intergalactic ship Argos in the not-too-distant future, transcribing the narrative of Aethon, recounted to her by her father, on pieces of sacking. She has never visited our world.

Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance, like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, are dreamers and outsiders who discover ingenuity and optimism in the face of dire danger. Their lives are inextricably linked. Doerr's vivid imagination transports us to worlds so vivid and absorbing that we forget about our own for a moment. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a lovely and redemptive work about stewardship—of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart—dedicated to "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come."

From the National Book Award finalist citation:

“From the 15th century to the future, the five protagonists in Anthony Doerr’s brilliant Cloud Cuckoo Land come together astonishingly in the stories they make of their lives, rewritten by time and circumstance. This marvelous book is like an astrolabe or an armillary sphere; a navigation instrument engineered to discover the world. Urgent, rife with relevance and compassion, Doerr’s novel affirms the necessity of the made thing, the capacious imagination, and storytelling.”