Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr's highly anticipated follow-up to All the Light We Cannot See, begins in what previous devotees might consider an unlikely time and place: a spaceship partway through a journey to colonize a new planet. In this ambitious novel about the necessity of storytelling for people on the edge of catastrophe, Doerr introduces a dizzying array of characters and settings, from Konstance, a 14-year-old passenger on the spaceship the Argos, to young Anna and Omeir, who find themselves on opposing sides during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; Zeno and Seymour are at the center of a kind of modern-day siege in the present. The characters are connected by the crises they face and by their shared appreciation for "Cloud Cuckoo Land," an ancient, fictional tragicomic Greek text about the persistent human drive to escape suffering and find somewhere better.
Cloud Cuckoo Land possesses a fable-like quality, sometimes skipping through characters' lives in a few pages, in a manner reminiscent of the briskly paced but sweeping scope of the titular Greek text--long passages of which are quoted in between chapters. Thus, readers are elegantly brought up to speed on Omeir's miraculous survival as a child maligned for his facial deformity and Anna's unlikely adventures smuggling books out of a crumbling building before the siege on Constantinople begins. Doerr's storytelling abilities--and the book's fable-like elements--come to the fore as the siege approaches and Anna and Omeir observe a conflict so large it is almost beyond their comprehension.
Cloud Cuckoo Land suggests that the harm people do does not and will not overwhelm their capacity for kindness and bravery. And it argues that stories have the power to bind us together over millennia. --Hank Stephenson, manuscript reader, the Sun magazine