Firstly thanks to 4th Estate for the proof copy. This author produced one of my favourite books of all time 'All the light I cannot See' was fearful that this last offering would not be up to this standard,delighted to say I was wrong.A story that spans the centuries from a Orphaned Seamstress and a boy with a cleft palette in 15th century Constantinople to a modern day young man who is outside society ,radicalised by Eco Warriors to blow something up to make a point to a spaceship finding a new home for humans to live on.All linked by and ancient Greek text that had been nearly destroyed but had been painstakingly translated by an elderly librarian whose library was going to be destroyed by the boy,and the 'traveler' who discovers the book in her digital world. There is a lot I have left out but find out for yourself.this book is fantastic,well done Mr Doerr .What an imagination.As you can tell I loved it and would give 6 stars if I could.

I won’t lie: I was confused at first. Cloud Cuckoo Land opens like a box of scattered relics, fragments of lives, centuries apart, not sitting neatly in one timeline. And then, slowly, it starts to behave like what it is: a manuscript unrolled, a braid tightened, a tapestry coming into focus thread by thread. I’ve seen the Cloud Atlas comparisons too, and I get it, the scope, the structure, the sense of story as a carrier pigeon across time. But Doerr’s book stands on its own. It isn’t trying to be clever. It’s trying to be true. What floored me most is how deeply human everyone feels, even when they’re flawed, even when they make choices you want to shake them for. These are people trying to do their best in circumstances that are indifferent at best, brutal at worst. And somehow, there is so much beauty in their tragic existence. “Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.” That’s the energy of the entire novel. Lost things. Hidden things. The way stories survive the fire, the flood, the tyrant, the worm. The way a single ancient tale can pass hand to hand, century to century, as if the book itself has a pulse. And the writing. God. The writing is stunning. Doerr can make a city feel like a living text, can make a small act of kindness feel like a kind of revolution. This is a novel obsessed with what we preserve, what we destroy, and what we owe each other when the world is cracking. “We are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.” I cared, intensely, for these characters. I cared for their loneliness, their longing, their tiny hopes. Their stubborn insistence on meaning. Their determination to keep going even when the odds are obscene. “Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.” And because I am who I am, the library thread hit me like a prayer. Stories as refuge. Reading as survival. Books as vessels for memory. “But books, like people, die… And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.” This book made me feel, in the best way, small and enormous at once. It is grief and wonder, violence and tenderness, the end of things and the stubborn beginning that follows. It unfolds beautifully. Everything comes together. And by the end, you realise the confusion was part of the design, because that’s how life feels when you’re inside it. One of the best books I’ve read in a while. 5 out of 5.

How to sum up this extraordinary book? It defies categorisation, but is still one of the most fantastical and sublime pieces of writing I have ever read. The story is several stories really, over a huge time span, from the Middle Ages, to the later 21st century. Each of the threads is a complete narrative on its own, with characters so beautifully drawn, that the reader drops in an out of their lives with little difficulty - setting the scene for each story at the start was just a little confusing, but that will not prevent me giving this book

A fantastic tale that weaves through time and location. It kept me turning the pages. A complex, thought-provoking yet entertaining read. A story of books, readers and writers.

Once in a while, you read a book which literally takes your breath away and becomes almost impossible to summarise with a few words. I feel like writing a novella to describe how much I adored “ Cloud Cuckoo Land” . We all know from his previous books that Doerr is a master of creating wonderful, complex characters showing us that as humans we are all complicated creatures. The story spans not only years, decades, centuries but millennia feeling like the story has been told from day one when we started talking , reading and writing them. You literally climb into each character’s conversation, tale and legend. This wonderful epic captures your imagination from the first chapter holding you captive until the last one. It is not only their stories connecting but also the story that connects them together. As a reader, you feel the timelessness of written words and it’s hope that we carry inside us for eternity. This is a perfect book every reader should ask for. Indulge yourself in Doerr’s masterful storytelling.