Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr, 2021
Historical fiction FantasyScience fictionContemporary fiction
Five lives across centuries, linked by an ancient Greek codex and the stubborn will to preserve stories.
Feels like wonder, hope and dread. About memory, art and society.
A page from the book
What we lose when a book goes out of the world.
Repository,” he finally says, “you know this word? A resting place. A text—a book—is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.” His eyes open very widely then, as though he peers into a great darkness. “But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death. Anthony Doerr.Doerr won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for All the Light We Cannot See; Cloud Cuckoo Land was published in 2021.
Books that feel like this
More by Anthony Doerr
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr, 2014
A blind Parisian girl and a German boy with a radio gift are pulled toward each other through the Nazi occupation, in a war story built from small, luminous things.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Cloud Cuckoo Land like?
- Feels like wonder, hope and dread. About memory, art and society.
- What should I read after Cloud Cuckoo Land?
- If you liked Cloud Cuckoo Land, try Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), The Lost Bookshop (Evie Woods) and The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafón).
A taste of the feed
A man buys supplies for a disaster and grieves the ordinary world mid-aisle.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
Station Eleven · Emily St. John Mandel
The books on your shelf are proof that something survives.
I couldn’t explain it, not even to myself, but books gave me an unflinching sense of stability and groundedness. That because words survived, somehow I would too.
The Lost Bookshop · Evie Woods
What if death is not life's enemy but its jealous lover?
The reason death sticks so closely to life isn’t biological necessity — it’s envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.
Life of Pi · Yann Martel
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