Cloud Cuckoo Land

13 hrs. 22 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Anthony Doerr

Narrator Vladimir Rybalchenko

Description

First published in Russian—a brand-new novel by Anthony Doerr, author of “All the Light We Cannot See,” awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Like this international bestseller, “The Bird City in the Clouds” has made the shortlist for the National Book Award in the U.S. The novel is built like a set of nested dolls (or like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”): the lives and fates of Anna and Omir intersect in a clever way—on opposite sides of a wall besieged by the Turks in Constantinople in 1453—while also involving the elderly enthusiast of ancient Greek literature Zeno and the young ecoterrorist Seymour in modern Idaho, as well as Constance, who flies to a distant exoplanet aboard the ship “Argos,” guided by the omniscient Sybil. Just as in “All the Light We Cannot See,” with Marie-Laure and Werner, all five here are dreamers and outsiders who don’t lose hope even amid what seems to be the most hopeless chaos and despair: “The Bird City in the Clouds” shows that not everything is lost for us—and that literature is precisely an important instrument of salvation (Boston Globe). For example, a mythical story of the ancient Greek Aiton who dreams of turning into a bird and flying to a fairy-tale city in the skies…