Doerr has a way with his prose -- it's what made his last book such a home-run for so many people -- but he's not David Mitchell. This tri-partite structure that's so popular now is not for everyone and I kept feeling like I was seeing the seams all over this instead of falling through it organically. Still, it's a good beach read and that's all it needs to be.

Published by Scribner on September 28, 2021

Anthony Doerr tells this story in multiple time frames. Each chapter begins with fragments of a story written by Antonius Diogenes, a second century storyteller. The title of Diogenes’ story translates as Cloud Cuckoo Land. The rest of the book bounces around in time. The segments are connected by Diogenes’ story. That connection reminds us of the importance of books and the ease with which, in the long stretch of time, knowledge is lost. We believe that everything will last “but that is only because of the extreme brevity of our own lives.” Cities “come and go like anthills.” “The houses of the rich burn as quick as any other.” From ancient works and the ruins of the past, we might discover lost knowledge that will help us understand how our present came into existence. We might also learn something about the universality of human experience.

Diogenes’ story tells of Aethon’s “journey to a utopian city in the sky.” The story was supposedly written on wooden slates that Diogenes discovered in Aethon’s tomb. Diogenes claimed to have transcribed the slates onto papyrus and had the transcripts delivered to his ailing niece, an entertainment designed to encourage her recovery.

Centuries later, as the Saracens prepare to sack Constantinople, a girl named Anna is ransacking a hidden trove of manuscripts, delivering them to monks who hope to find a book that contains the entire world. Anna believes Diogenes’ codex fits that description when it speaks of “a place of golden towers stacked on clouds, redshanks, quails, moorhens, and cuckoos, where rivers of broth gushed from spigots.”

North of Constantinople, Omeir was born with a facial deformity that makes his village regard him as a djinn. His grandfather cannot find it in himself to leave the baby to die. Omeir turns into a gentle child who raises and loves two oxen before he and his oxen are drafted to attack Constantinople. Omeir’s path eventually intersects Anna’s. Diogenes’ book, once important only to Anna, now becomes important to Omeir.

Zeno Ninis is a prisoner of war in Korea during the early 1950s, where he meets and falls in love with a scholar named Rex. Zeno learns root words in Greek from Rex, including a particularly telling phrase that translates as: “That’s what the gods do. They spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”

Seymour Stuhlman is a child in Lakeport, Idaho in the mid-2010s. Birds are losing their Lakeport habitat to developers who replace forests with parking lots. One of those birds was an owl Seymour knew as Trustyfriend. Medication is the adult answer to Seymour’s perception of the doomed world in which he lives, but Seymour has a bent for subversion that neither medication nor prison will change. His eventual purpose in life is to undo the lies that corporate America tells people who prefer a clean and cheerful world to the one they have created.

Zeno’s story collides with Seymour’s in 2020. Seymour is apparently prepared to blow up the Lakeport library as Zeno is upstairs, directing a children’s play.

Konstance lives on a generation ship making its way to a distant planet after Earth has succumbed to environmental disaster. Konstance loses herself in the generation ship’s computer, discovering Earth’s history, before she is forced into isolation to avoid a rapidly spreading contagion. Konstance’s father had a book called Cloud Cuckoo Land, translated from the Greek by Zeno Ninis. In the ship’s virtual library, she searches for information about Zeno and begins to guess the truth about her isolated existence.

Diogenes’ tale links all the characters, illustrating the reality that history has unforeseeable impacts on the future, that people who history does not recall have played their role in shaping our present. The novel’s characters are imbued with the same qualities as Aethon. They persist. They take wrong turns but eventually right their course. They stand in awe of a world they don’t understand, but they strive to gain knowledge of their place within it. They might get lost, they might lose things, but they come to understand that “sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” The characters are fighting not just to make sense of the world but to make sense of themselves.

Like his characters, Doerr’s prose is lively and surprising. He asks important questions: “Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we are young?” Why do we find it so hard to accept reality? Why do people want to conquer others when what they have is enough? Doerr gives the reader nutritious thoughts to chew upon, but he does so in the context of a story that gradually evolves from bewildering to astonishing.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

I had stopped reading this about a quarter in for months because I couldn’t get past the patchwork of stories—picked it up yesterday and couldn’t put it down again. A fantastic tapestry of coincidence and human-ness and hope and also deep pain but sheesh. I’d say stick with it, it’s worth it, even if (and this may be unpopular) I could have done without the transcription of cloud cuckoo land interspersed throughout. Wowow

This dedication by the author just speaks to my hear with this simple statement - "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come." With that dedication you jump into the book with 3 stories tying together an event (past, present and future). This definitely will be another bestseller and people will fall in love with the writing and storyline.
Truth be told I had a hard time with this book because there was so much detail in the settings, the characters and the back & forth of different timelines. I could not stay focused and I don't know how to rate this because nothing was wrong with storylines or writing but I felt like I was in college preparing for an exam and I needed to take copious notes to pass.

Thank you Scribner and NetGalley for giving me this opportunity to read an advance copy of this book.

If you're a fan of Jorge Luis Borges or of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, you'll enjoy the labyrinthine interconnectedness of this multiplot adventure which follows a diverse cast of characters across time and locale. It's a work of staggering invention. The lands visited include Constantinople under siege, a library, a land plucked from myth, a forest just prior to gentrification, a spaceship on its way to colonize a more habitable planet, and more. Doerr's characters are equally compelling: a clever orphan girl who is custodian to an ancient text; Omir, a youth with a cleft palate and a deep relationship with two oxen, Mountain and Tree; a shape-shifting mythological character, Aethon (generally in mule form); an octogenarian who learned to translate Greek while a prisoner-of-war; a neurodivergent young boy who befriends an owl; and a perceptive young girl who is orphaned on a spaceship as ai drives it toward a possibly habitable planet.

The writing is lush. You'll intuit the connections before they are revealed, but even in the reveal, the magic is not diminished.

The story is about siege--of cities, of the land, of libraries, of history--and the transcendent power of the human stories that results.

Highly recommended.

Cloud Cuckoo Land goes cuckoo (in a good way) with the postmodern, found novel structure -- shooting it back in time before House of Leaves/Don Quixote to Ancient Greece and an apocryphal book by Diogenes of the same name, telling the tale of a peasant named Aethon who undergoes an epic Odyssean journey of shape shifting, whale-ingesting, and flight to reach a paradise city in the clouds and possibly find the meaning of life.

This book is both a Holy Grail McGuffin and spiritual parallel guide for people in 3 different time periods -- people on either side of the siege on Constantinople in the 1400's, people around the present day (further entangled by their flashbacks) dealing with the impact of progress on the environment, and people in the far future escaping Earth as the last hope for humanity -- focusing on a young girl and the ship's AI.

The love of books and knowledge is a huge theme, and the characters' journeys and parallels to Aethon's ordeals are very intricately plotted as they search for purpose in their lives -- sometimes on the right track and sometimes misguided by people with selfish or malicious intent. A key theme is the discovery of how interconnected these polar opposites are, and whether to accept that and live in the real world or stay in paradise.

The book itself undergoes its own journey and transformation -- from a bound manuscript that people attempt to protect from the elements and age to the subject of translation/interpretation/reenactment, to an Easter egg hidden in an immersive virtual reality atlas of Earth at a point in time.

The book takes some effort (though not as much as the Ancient Greek one) to painstakingly put the pieces together and bring them to life, but is well worth it for the rich layers.

I enjoyed parts of this book, but overall struggled to become invested. I think I needed more uninterrupted time to devote to reading and thinking about the story and characters but I didn't have that luxury.

It took me a long time to get into this book—this is a problem I often have with stories that jump around through time and between main characters: every time I start to get into one story, and get to know one set of people, I feel like our conversation is rudely interrupted by the next segment. But, by the time I finished the book, I cared about all the characters in all their times, and was very invested in all their stories and how they fit together.

Anthony Doerr is a master of his craft. This epic, sweeping tale had so many small moments that resonated so deeply with me, but what mattered most of all was the overarching love of books and literature reflected on these pages. This is the ultimate epic tale for those that love and appreciate books--writing as a craft, storytelling as a way of preserving history, and reading as a way of connection. I typically don't do well with novels of this length, and I didn't even notice with this one. Thank you so much to NetGalley for my advance copy of this. I am so glad that I finally dove in and lost myself in this story.

Did not finish. I tried to like it but I couldn't get invested in any of the story lines (of which there are many) and it didn't engage me. Obviously there are readers for this book,. but I'm not one of them.

This novel is not my typical cup of tea. I'm not really a sci-fi fan, and the description felt a little sci-fi to me. I read some early reviews and was almost scared off: too many different story lines going on at the same time, but not told in a linear way; too many descriptions; too confusing; too long. But I loved All The Light We Cannot See, and despite my reservations, I decided I had to at least give it a try. Sooo glad I did! Although it is true that there are multiple (seemingly) unconnected stories, lots of description, and that it is long, none of it is "too much." I did not find it difficult to read or keep the stories straight. There is a through-line that connects the stories, and I think if it was told in a linear fashion, the magic of this novel would not exist. It is not really sci-fi, but does have elements of past, present, and future. I've also read criticism of the "villian" in the story being autistic. I didn't see him as a villian, but as a sad, lost soul. Autism (if that was his affliction) had less to do with his actions than the world around him and the circumstances of his life. In my opinion, this is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story, different than anything else you are likely to read this year, and definitely worth your time. Thank you NetGalley and publishers for providing a digital ARC for review.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is not for the faint of heart, but the story is so worth it the read. Doerr has a unique ability to bring separate stories together from very different threads, interweaving them in a beautiful tapestry that is Cloud Cuckoo Land.

The story unfolds across centuries of time connected by a single tale of a shepherd's journey to reach a mystical utopia in the sky. While it can be hard moving back and forth between chapters, I found myself wanting devour as much of the book as possible every night so I could see the final weaving of this story. Beautiful, timely,

Beautiful and timely, prepare yourself to feel a range of emotion has you dive into the world that is Cloud Cuckoo Land.

---

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I may be in the minority here because i had high hopes but I did not finish this one. I just couldn't get into it.

All Light We Cannot See is a all-time favorite to me and I was no expecting a book by Mr. Doerr so soon, and I was glad to be surprised. This one is good, well-written, with characters that we fall in love with them. This is a certainly a five star.

A masterpiece. I wasn't sure where this was going at first but once I got settled into the stories, I was swept away. We've waited awhile for the latest Anthony Doerr and it was worth the wait.

A boy and girl from two different cultures colliding in fifteenth century Constantinople, a boy and an elderly man in Idaho, and a girl on a ship in the future – and they are all connected by a story. Love, strength, and hope. Finding ourselves and connecting with others. It’s powerful.

I was excited to read this because his first book had such good reviews. I probably should have actually read that first. The author is probably just not for me. The writing is beautiful and it just lulls you into the story but I don't know what the story is and nothing is happening. There are three time lines connected by some Greek myth and science fiction. I know that at the end this will all tie together but I just don't care anymore. I'm not rooting for anyone and I don't really like anyone.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Scribner for my copy.

Wonderful and well written book overall, though I had a hard time investing in each of the four different stories. It felt like as soon as I connected with one set of characters, I was moving on to the next again.

This book was a monster. But I love how all of the characters intertwined within different timelines. It made all 600 pages fly by

Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See was really great; that is why I wanted to read Cloud Cuckoo Land. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the confusion of the multiple storylines. It still had some really good passages. Thanks for the opportunity Scribner.