Scribner is thrilled to announce the publication of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the highly anticipated new novel from Anthony Doerr, whose critically-acclaimed 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See has spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, sold more than 5.5 million copies in North America across print, eBook, and audio formats and 9.3 million copies worldwide, and was the winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize. Cloud Cuckoo Land will be published on September 28, 2021.
Cloud Cuckoo Land follows three storylines: 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. 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—provides solace, mystery, and the most profound human connection to these five unforgettable characters. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and misfits, on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to survive and finding resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril.
“The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation,” said Doerr. “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. Along the way, Cloud Cuckoo Land became a paean to libraries large and small, and to our species’ extraordinary capacity to transmit stories from generation to generation. I’m thrilled to continue my 20-plus year relationship with the amazing Nan Graham and all the phenomenal people at Scribner and Simon & Schuster.”
“Anthony Doerr dazzles with every sentence, with his stunning imagination and boundless compassion. Cloud Cuckoo Land is about stewardship—of books, of the planet, of the human spirit,” said Nan Graham, Senior Vice President and Publisher of Scribner, and Doerr’s longtime editor. “Dedicated ‘to librarians then, now, and in the years to come,’ it is a novel to heal divides, a radiant light in our broken world—by a writer we have loved and published for more than twenty years.”
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 story collections, Memory Wall and The Shell Collector; the novel About Grace; and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, all published by Scribner. 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.
