Oh, what a gift for the onset of winter and the holidays! Just as I was wondering what would appear, along came eight tiny reindeer! 

Well, not exactly, it was my older daughter with an almost brand new copy of Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. For those of you unfamiliar with Doerr’s previous novel, All the Light We Cannot See, just know that he has a particular skill at weaving characters’ stories through space and time and arriving at a most satisfactory ending.

In Cloud Cuckoo Land we find Omeir, Anna, Zeno, and Konstance, separated by half a millenium and actual earth-space. Each carries a supporting cast and back stories that lead to the beginning of the book and its beautiful conclusion. 

Anna struggles to survive in Constantinople during the great siege that lasted from 1439 to 1452; she is a hopeless embroiderer but avid reader, especially since she found the manuscript of Aethon’s tale. 

The Bulgarian peasant boy Omeir is conscripted as a soldier in the war because only he can lead his almost supernatural oxen, Tree and Moonlight. Of course they must meet, just as you must participate in their stories.

During his years as a prisoner of war, Zeno learned to read Greek, thereby discovering the magical story of Aethon’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. In 2020, he, Marian the Librarian, and five special children set out to perform Zeno’s adaptation of the ancient Greek work. 

Unbeknownst to them, the teenaged Seymour, out of his mind in an idealistic fantasy, is planting a bomb in the library stacks. The journeys of Zeno and Seymour are long and arduous and mind-boggling as they eventually merge at the town Library in Lakeport, Idaho.

And then there’s Konstance, alone in the space capsule Argos and 65 years into the mission, with only her AI, Sybil, to “keep her company.” On scraps of sacking, she is writing the story her father told her many years before of Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

If you’re ready for an adventure, great reader, open Doerr’s novel, with Aethon’s promise: “Stranger, whoever you are, open this to find what will amaze you.”