Author Anthony Doerr won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as the 2015 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in fiction for his smash-hit 2014 WWII novel, All the Light We Cannot See, but if you thought his next project would take you back in time, well, you’re only a third right. On Friday, Scribner revealed details of Doerr’s upcoming book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, which follows three groups of people across three timelines, all impacted by one text about (what else?) journeying to Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Per the publisher’s description, Doerr’s novel follows the stories of “Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city wall during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour and gentle octogenarian Zeno, in an attack on a public library in present-day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for a distant exoplanet, decades from now.†All of the novel’s protagonists are united by “a single copy of an ancient text — the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land,†which “provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters.â€
“The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation,†said Doerr in the release. “I wanted this novel to reflect those anxieties, but also offer meaningful hope, so I tried to create a tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness — with other species, with each other, with the ones who lived before us, and the ones who will be here after we’re gone.†Cloud Cuckoo Land is set to be released on September 28, when it will presumably be eight months more tragically relevant than it is today.