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. It is the night of the dress rehearsal that Seymour, the ecoterrorist, brings his bomb to the library, thinking it deserted, hoping only to damage or destroy the model home and offices of a real estate development company next door.Дoerr does amazing things with his story, with this narrative spread unevenly across such disparate characters, such different voices. He is captured, survives, ends up translating the Diogenes manuscript and, decades later, working in the library of his hometown, he helps a group of schoolchildren stage 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' as a play. In the 1950's, Zeno Ninis, the boy in Lakeport, lost his father in WWII and goes himself to fight in the Korean War. He has been conscripted into the Sultan's army besieging the city but will, months later, find Anna among those who've fled. Outside the walls, there is a boy, Omeir, with a cleft palate and a deep connection to his two massive oxen, Moonlight and Tree. She meets a group of Italian scholars looking for ancient manuscripts, grave-robbing the city ahead of the war that is coming. She spends her nights thieving, her days in a monastery with her sister. In Constantinople, Anna is a failure as a seamstress, but learns to read ancient Greek from a dying tutor to rich children in exchange for stolen wine and bread. 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. 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.

Antonius diogenes