Inside the fabled walls of the city works Anna, a 13-year-old seamstress in a sweatshop that weaves intricate robes for priests.

Outside, however, sits Seymour Stuhlman, packing a gun in his jacket and a bomb in his backpack, disenchanted with the real estate development that threatens the woods and the rural surroundings, his only sanctuary from the noisy world around him.Īs an explosive drama unfolds at the library, Doerr transports us to an equally violent world of 1453 as Constantinople prepares to fall to the Ottoman Empire. The book opens with Zeno Ninis, an 86-year-old ancient literary enthusiast who has written a play he’s producing with local schoolchildren in the present-day Lakeport, Idaho, library. “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is told in a series of manuscripts that has survived through the centuries by the sheer will of those to whom the story has touched – and which over the centuries ends up being the saving grace for all five characters. The thread winding together the fabric of the tale is the fictional story of the title, a mythical book from real-life lost author and philosopher Antonius Diogenes. Yet Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winner for “All the Light We Cannot See,” doesn’t let the reader wander too far without offering a spark in each chapter that suggests somehow this will all make sense. It’s like the multiple jigsaw puzzles that one character struggles with in the novel, ending up with pieces strewn across the floor and under furniture. Still, all that’s really required is to form an early attachment to at least one of the characters. I found myself starting and stopping the novel several times.

Doerr delivers on that promise amid colorful details and a rhythmic writing style that keeps the story moving toward the reader’s final reward.īut it’s a payoff that requires work. The novel challenges the reader with five characters spanning five centuries in the past and one into the future amid an unspoken promise that all will wind up together in the end. With a melding of historical fiction, social commentary, fairy tale and science fiction, Anthony Doerr delivers a deft and intricately woven tale that makes “Cloud Cuckoo Land” one of the most memorable books of the year.

Book review cloud cuckoo land