Doerr has packed it dense with what are clearly hours and hours of deep research-the chapter on the building of the biggest cannon in the ancient world is just one example–and yet it flies.

It would rob the reader of some of the joys of the book to say too much about how all these disparate threads come together, but the novel reads like it’s half its actual length.

He fills it with with detours and tangents, and includes big chunks of his invented Greek fable, as well as a spaceship, which tends to throw some readers.ĭoerr still manages to make it all look easy. Some of Doerr’s fans from the wildly bestselling All The Light We Cannot See-and some critics-might have trouble following him on this long journey. It becomes a lifeline, even as time and decay and loss threaten the story itself.

Finally, Konstance discovers that she’ll die without ever seeing the world that’s supposed to be her salvation.īut the story of Aethon, the shepherd who becomes a donkey, then a fish, then a bird, manages to lift each of them from their grim circumstances, and into an imagined world. Zeno survives a Korean War POW camp only to face a death at the hands of Seymour, who wants to detonate a pair of homemade bombs to protest climate change. Omeir, born with a cleft palate, is meant to be one of the countless bodies left in the mud behind the marching army. And they will-this is history, and it already happened. Anna can expect, once the invaders breach the city, that they will rape or kill her. (In actuality, Doerr invented the story, taking elements from Aristophanes and from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.)Īll of the characters have something else in common as well: they’re facing their deaths. And in the future, another 14-year-old girl named Konstance escapes the burning Earth for a planet 4.23 light years away.Īll of these characters are united through the centuries by a story-Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable written by Antonius Diogenes in ancient Greece about a shepherd who stumbles upon a play and, mistaking the city of the gods on stage for a real place, sets out to find it and live there. In 2020, in a small lakeside town in Idaho, Zeno Ninis, an elderly veteran, faces the end of a life of frustrated desires, while Seymour Stuhlman, a high school student, casts himself as an avenger of the dying planet. In 1453, a 14-year-old orphan named Anna is caught in the Siege of Constantinopole, while on the other side of the city’s walls, a young oxherd named Omeir is stuck working for the invading forces. But instead of binge-watching Ted Lasso or power-snacking, Doerr has written Cloud Cuckoo Land, a massive, extraordinary book about five characters trying to find a reason to live when facing extinction. Anthony Doerr has, like many of us, clearly been doing some heavy thinking about the end of the world.

Cloud cuckoo land synopsis