It is an epic of the quietest kind, whispering across 600 years in a voice no louder than a librarian's.ĭoerr does not overstate the importance of the story-within-a-story. The greatest joy in it comes from watching the pieces snap into place. For his central, eponymous hook, Doerr invents what is a ridiculous, Big Rock Candy Mountain kind of ancient Greek yarn about a dim shepherd named Aethon who hears a story of an imaginary city in the sky where there is no pain or hunger or suffering and believes it real who is turned into a donkey, a fish and an owl in his pursuit of this place - each echoing the lives of those characters whose stories intersect across the centuries, whose lives are shaped by Diogenes's comic tale. He breaks the story into a thousand pieces, then spends every page carefully putting it all back in order again.Ĭloud Cuckoo Land is a book that is in love with nature and with libraries, that disdains advancement and yet embraces technology (to read his descriptions of the construction of a massive cannon outside the walls of Constantinople or the experience of virtual reality aboard a space-ark a century from now are masterpieces of worldbuilding and wonder).

Between the covers, across hundreds of pages, he has everything - birth and death, love and war, heists, escapes, the particular (though not unique) perils of growing up in 1453, 1940, 20. He makes links that persist across centuries, flits from place to place and person to person with an enviable grace, making seemingly impossible logical and temporal leaps seem as natural as breath. These are the points of the loom on which Anthony Doerr weaves his newest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land - a tapestry that stretches across centuries, linking the lives of these characters through words, stories, libraries and, most notably, an invented manuscript (for which the novel is named) written by the very real ancient Greek author Antonius Diogenes.ĭoerr does amazing things with his story, with this narrative spread unevenly across such disparate characters, such different voices. She has been inside for 300-some days, her only company an artificial intelligence called Sybil who contains the sum total of all mankind's knowledge. In 2146, mission year 65 of the Argos - a generation ship headed for a new home on Beta Oph2 - a girl arranges scraps of paper on the floor inside a sealed room.

In 2020, a troubled teenager sits in his car outside the Lakeport public library, a gun in his pocket, a bomb in the backpack beside him.

In the 1940s, in Lakeport, Idaho, a boy follows his father to a new job, a new life and, eventually, a new war. In 15th century Constantinople, a young girl scales the high walls of an abandoned monastery said to be haunted by spirits who carry their chamberlain through the broken halls on a throne made of bones.

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