After that, I loved this story and all the timelines.Īs a book reviewer, I’m constantly planning out my next read. I think when the focus was on Zeno’s past in Korea was where the story really took off for me. And I knew that the thread which tied these stories together was going to be a massive payoff in the end.īut that said, it did take time for me to truly get into it. It wasn’t that I found it confusing because I feel the author did a good job of laying the groundwork and make sure the settings were vivid and complex. As I mentioned above, I struggled at first with all these storylines. The TimelinesĪs you can see, this is a massive book in reference to scale and time frame. In the not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. But tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. He’s fascinated with the Greek language and is rehearsing five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story. Zeno is an 80-year-old man who has spent most of his live in small-town Idaho, except for when he was a prisoner of war. She yearns for something more and once she learns to read, her curiosity only blossoms more. She is the one who finds the story of Aethon. The main characters include thirteen-year-old Anna who lives inside the walls of Constantinople. This story provides both solace and mystery to our characters. The thread that ties these timelines together is an ancient text-the story of Author, who longs to be turned into a bird so he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. The main timelines include Constantinople in the fifteenth century, small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now. But of course, when it does, that’s the beauty of these kinds of stories. It’s hard at first to see how it will all connect. Whew, this is a hard synopsis to write out! There are several different timelines that take place both in present day and at various times in history in all kinds of locations. I got choked up quite a bit-it’s moving, emotional, sad and hopeful all at the same time. It did take me a bit to get into it, which I’ll get into more below, but once the story gets rolling, it’s fantastic. So I was quite excited to see that Anthony has a new novel coming out this year! It’s funny because I actually expected another tale similar to All the Light We Cannot See but Cloud Cuckoo Land is world’s away from that one. While there is so many fantastic WWII historical fiction out there, All the Light We Cannot See is very special. I remember seeing Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See everywhere - it was on the bestsellers list for years and everyone from President Obama to others all sang its praises.

Cloud cuckoo land synopsis