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Cloud Cuckoo Land: From the prize-winning, international bestselling author of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ comes a stunning new novel in 2021 Hardcover – 29 September 2021
Anthony Doerr (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A GUARDIAN BEST FICTION PICK OF 2021
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’s FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2021
‘Serious novels are rarely this fun’ The Times
‘A gift’ Guardian
‘Buoyant with humanity’ Daily Mail
‘Worth the seven year wait’ Stylist
When everything is lost, it’s our stories that survive
How do we weather the end of things? Cloud Cuckoo Land brings together an unforgettable cast of dreamers and outsiders from past, present and future to offer a vision of survival against all odds.
Constantinople, 1453:
An orphaned seamstress and a cursed boy with a love for animals risk everything on opposite sides of a city wall to protect the people they love.
Idaho, 2020:
An impoverished, idealistic kid seeks revenge on a world that’s crumbling around him. Can he go through with it when a gentle old man stands between him and his plans?
Unknown, Sometime in the Future:
With her tiny community in peril, Konstance is the last hope for the human race. To find a way forward, she must look to the oldest stories of all for guidance.
Bound together by a single ancient text, these tales interweave to form a tapestry of solace and resilience and a celebration of storytelling itself. Like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s new novel is a tale of hope and of profound human connection.
- Print length640 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publisher4th Estate GB
- Publication date29 September 2021
- Dimensions15.9 x 4.2 x 24 cm
- ISBN-100008478295
- ISBN-13978-0008478292
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Product description
Review
Praise for Cloud Cuckoo Land:
‘Sets him comfortably alongside Tolkien, Rowling and David Mitchell, and he is a much more elegant writer than two of those … Cloud Cuckoo Land is an impressive achievement and a joy to read. Serious novels are rarely this fun.’ The Times
‘There is a kind of book a seasoned writer produces after a big success: large-hearted, wide in scope and joyous. Following his Pulitzer winner All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land is a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel’ Guardian
‘A paean to stories as a source of sustenance and solace, and to the sweetness of our shared terrestrial home, Doerr’s narrative is buoyant with humanity and its author’s palpable pleasure in invention’ Daily Mail
‘A humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences. Cloud Cuckoo Land is ultimately a celebration of books, the power and possibilities of reading’ New York Times
‘Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fascinatingly ambitious tale that’s worth the seven year wait’ Stylist
‘Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Doerr’s new novel traverses time and space, unifying his characters through a text written by Diogenes in the first century AD. Cloud Cuckoo Land begins there and sweeps through the millennia in a huge, imaginative arc that celebrates the outsiders, the writers and the keepers of books. An ultimately hopeful and life-affirming novel about the essence of love, literature and art’ Irish Independent
‘This is a dazzling epic of love, war and the joy of books – one for David Mitchell fans’ Guardian
‘Wonderment and despair, love and destruction and hope – all find their place in its sumptuously plotted pages’ Observer
Book Description
From the prize-winning, international bestselling author of ‘All the Light We Cannot See’ comes a stunning new novel in 2021
About the Author
Anthony Doerr is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See, currently in development as a Netflix limited series. He is also the author of two short story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, all published by 4th Estate. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
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Product details
- Publisher : 4th Estate GB (29 September 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 640 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0008478295
- ISBN-13 : 978-0008478292
- Dimensions : 15.9 x 4.2 x 24 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 74,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 40 in Mythlogical Sagas
- 282 in Ancient & Medieval Literature
- 426 in Weather Science
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Anthony Doerr has won numerous prizes for his fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize and the Carnegie Medal. His novel, 'All the Light We Cannot See,' was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and his new novel, 'Cloud Cuckoo Land,' published in September of 2021, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Learn more at www.anthonydoerr.com.
Customer reviews

Reviewed in Australia on 17 March 2022
Top reviews from Australia
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This thematic thread doesn’t just run through Cloud Cuckoo Land, it is the one idea that holds up the entire edifice, a flimsy foundation for a monumental novel that is always on the brink of crashing down.
It doesn’t crumble. Anthony Doerr is a skilled and imaginative writer. He also built his opus as three distinct but interwoven stories, an interrupted narrative that promises depth - just around the corner, reader! - but mostly delivers scope. And lots of it.
Even summarizing the three stories is preemptively exhausting. Suffice to say they take place in different periods – the 1453 siege of Constantinople, a beleaguered 20th century and a distant future where humans travel to Mars, our civilization in tow. All three narratives suggest literature is our one redemptive feature as a species, yet the convoluted structure cannot hide that taken in isolation and read linearly, each tale is somewhat pedestrian in its telling.
To make sure we care – and it’s important that we do, there are over 600 pages to get through – the author repeatedly puts young people (and animals) in harm’s way. That slightly formulaic brand of melodrama worked wonders in uber-bestseller All The Light We Cannot See, but wears thin here, perhaps because the device is used ad nauseam.
Books are messages across cultures and eras, and we readers have a responsibility of stewardship. It’s a beautiful sentiment nearly crushed under the sheer weight of storytelling. At the risk of letting everyone down, I will relinquish my responsibility in this case and fail to recommend the book to others. Rest easy, though, Cloud Cuckoo Land is already adored by many and will be read long after we’ve left our dying planet and settled on Mars.

Reviewed in Australia on 17 March 2022
This thematic thread doesn’t just run through Cloud Cuckoo Land, it is the one idea that holds up the entire edifice, a flimsy foundation for a monumental novel that is always on the brink of crashing down.
It doesn’t crumble. Anthony Doerr is a skilled and imaginative writer. He also built his opus as three distinct but interwoven stories, an interrupted narrative that promises depth - just around the corner, reader! - but mostly delivers scope. And lots of it.
Even summarizing the three stories is preemptively exhausting. Suffice to say they take place in different periods – the 1453 siege of Constantinople, a beleaguered 20th century and a distant future where humans travel to Mars, our civilization in tow. All three narratives suggest literature is our one redemptive feature as a species, yet the convoluted structure cannot hide that taken in isolation and read linearly, each tale is somewhat pedestrian in its telling.
To make sure we care – and it’s important that we do, there are over 600 pages to get through – the author repeatedly puts young people (and animals) in harm’s way. That slightly formulaic brand of melodrama worked wonders in uber-bestseller All The Light We Cannot See, but wears thin here, perhaps because the device is used ad nauseam.
Books are messages across cultures and eras, and we readers have a responsibility of stewardship. It’s a beautiful sentiment nearly crushed under the sheer weight of storytelling. At the risk of letting everyone down, I will relinquish my responsibility in this case and fail to recommend the book to others. Rest easy, though, Cloud Cuckoo Land is already adored by many and will be read long after we’ve left our dying planet and settled on Mars.

I often dislike books with multiple stories that are loosely connected, but this author stitches the different narratives together so cleverly, with such an unpretentious love of story. Wow.
Top reviews from other countries

...but.... but, but... when done right, a slow-builder that promises much can sometime deliver most. Multiple stories, when told right, can deliver multiple times the load. Cloud Cuckoo Land is ABSOLUTELY a quality read that doesn't fail to deliver and the mythical tale of Aethon's adventures tie it all together beautifully, even as it seems possibly "annoyingly quirky" to begin with.
There aren't too many "all in one" works of fiction these days, with a start, a middle and and end. It used be that fiction had this to aim for at least, but nowadays never-ending book-series seem the order of the day. To my mind, the best fiction is a story that builds to a knockout ending that leaves you dazed (and likely confused) by the end. This IS such a tale.
I still don't know if it all makes sense (well, I kind of know it doesn't / also of course it does) - but it doesn't matter. I still haven't thought enough about it to figure out if there are some inconsistencies or a coincidence-too-far in places. Part of me is looking forward to thinking on it for a long time to come and part of me doesn't want to over-analyse it. There's a lot to digest here, but sometimes, like a good cake, it's best to gorge and enjoy rather than spend time dissecting the ingredients, trying to find an element that could be eliminated. The little tangy taste you get from an isolated under-ripe raspberry can be just what's needed to raise the flavour of a slightly-too-musky dark chocolate. And maybe you don't like cream, but when it has just the right consistency, with just the right flavours flowing through, the whole is many times more than the sum of its parts.
That's not to put-down the individual parts of this book. Each, in turn is magnificently told and a lovely read. But, stitched together with "Diogenes's" thread, the whole is multiple times more special.
Thank you for restoring my faith in modern fiction.



Even though this is a long book, the many separate chapters make it fly by.
Well worth the read.
