This book takes place from the 1400s at the takeover of Constantinople to well into the future. I’m so glad I followed that instinct to continue. Due to my adoration of his prior book, All the Light We Cannot See, and the murmurings of a Pulitzer and/or National Book Award, I gave the book another try. The prose is brilliant, and this author can put together stunning scenes, but the first two times I sat down to read it, I wasn’t getting hooked. Honestly, I tried this book two times before committing to it. She has never set foot on our planet.Ĭloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is a magnificent piece of work, large in scope, but at times, daunting. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father.
Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr creates thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests.
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