Cloud Cuckoo Land / Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See was such a memorable tour-de-force that when the author published his next novel after a gap of seven years, I was anxious to read it. Cloud Cuckoo Land similarly interweaves parallel narratives, which All the Light did so successfully. This time it’s several stories, separated by both time and space. Most memorable was the description of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 with the characters of Omeir and Anna. It was probably this portion of the book that I enjoyed most and was most reminiscent of the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light. There is a contemporary thread based on a solitary act of eco-terrorism in a public library in Idaho, and a future thread with climate refugees, set in a space ship on its way to a far-flung planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. All these competing narratives only really start to stitch themselves together about halfway through this 600-page opus. The surprise ending, along with the cleverness of how the stories interlink and are resolved, make this an enjoyable read. It had an impossible task to live up to the magic that All the Light spun, but for readers who enjoyed that novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land should definitely be added to their reading list.

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