Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. His path and Anna’s will cross.įive 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. 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. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness-with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone. Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope-and a book.

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