Cloud Cuckoo Land

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ‘A dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books’ Guardian ‘There is magic in this place … You just have to sit and breathe and wait and it will find you’ Fifteenth-century Constantinople. Present day Idaho. The future, and humanity’s last hope. Across time and space, five young dreamers are bound by a single ancient text. Together, they tell a story of a world in peril; of the power of words, of resilience, and of hope against all odds. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See returns with a heart-breaking, magnificent epic of human connection and a love letter to storytelling itself. ‘Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages’ Observer ‘Ingenious, hopeful and totally absorbing’ Financial Times ‘This engagingly written, big-hearted book is a must-read’ Daily Mirror

Praise for Cloud Cuckoo Land: ‘Sets him comfortably alongside Tolkien, Rowling and David Mitchell, and he is a much more elegant writer than two of those … Cloud Cuckoo Land is an impressive achievement and a joy to read. Serious novels are rarely this fun.’ The Times ‘There is a kind of book a seasoned writer produces after a big success: large-hearted, wide in scope and joyous. Following his Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel’ Guardian ‘A paean to stories as a source of sustenance and solace, and to the sweetness of our shared terrestrial home, Doerr’s narrative is buoyant with humanity and it’s author’s palpable pleasure in invention’ Daily Mail ‘A humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences. Cloud Cuckoo Land is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading’ New York Times ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fascinatingly ambitious tale that’s worth the seven year wait’ Stylist ‘Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr’s new novel traverses time and space, unifying his characters through a text written by Diogenes in the first century AD. Cloud Cuckoo Land begins there and sweeps through the millennia in a huge, imaginative arc that celebrates the outsiders, the writers and the keepers of books. An ultimately hopeful and life-affirming novel about the essence of love, literature and art’ Irish Independent ‘This is a dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books – one for David Mitchell fans’ Guardian ‘Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages’ Observer

Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, currently in development as a Netflix limited series. He is also the author of two short story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, all published by 4th Estate. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.