Between the covers, across hundreds of pages, he has everything - birth and death, love and war, heists, escapes, the particular (though not unique) perils of growing up in 1453, 1940, 20. He makes links that persist across centuries, flits from place to place and person to person with an enviable grace, making seemingly impossible logical and temporal leaps seem as natural as breath. These are the points of the loom on which Anthony Doerr weaves his newest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land - a tapestry that stretches across centuries, linking the lives of these characters through words, stories, libraries and, most notably, an invented manuscript (for which the novel is named) written by the very real ancient Greek author Antonius Diogenes.ĭoerr does amazing things with his story, with this narrative spread unevenly across such disparate characters, such different voices. She has been inside for 300-some days, her only company an artificial intelligence called Sybil who contains the sum total of all mankind's knowledge. In 2146, mission year 65 of the Argos - a generation ship headed for a new home on Beta Oph2 - a girl arranges scraps of paper on the floor inside a sealed room.

In 2020, a troubled teenager sits in his car outside the Lakeport public library, a gun in his pocket, a bomb in the backpack beside him. In the 1940s, in Lakeport, Idaho, a boy follows his father to a new job, a new life and, eventually, a new war. In 15th century Constantinople, a young girl scales the high walls of an abandoned monastery said to be haunted by spirits who carry their chamberlain through the broken halls on a throne made of bones.

Cloud cuckoo land by anthony doerr