Virtual Community Book Club: Cloud Cuckoo Land
Join us for Community Book Club! We’ll be meeting on Wednesday, January 25 at 7 p.m. on Zoom. Click here to sign up for this virtual meeting!
Interested in attending in-person? Click here for details about our in-person meeting.
- Who: Everyone welcome
- How much: Free
- Which book: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
- Where to get a copy: Borrow at WPL or buy at Armchair Books (mention the book club and receive 15% off)
Synopsis: Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.
Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege.
And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.
Read ahead: In February, we’re reading Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.
