Anthony Doerr: Cloud Cuckoo (July 2023)

This is a novel about the stories of five very different characters. There is a girl who flees from the fall of Constantinople; a young man dragooned into working for the Ottoman army; a Korean P.O.W., now an old man in a library with children in his care and a bomber downstairs; an autistic teenager coerced into eco terrorism; and a fourteen year old girl, possibly the last human being alive, hurtling through space on a mission to find a habitable planet.

All of these people facing great danger find a way through their crises, to, as the book puts it, slip the trap.

Any of these adventures could have been a novel in its own right, but their lives are interwoven by a tale from a manuscript from the second century. They read this to others to comfort them, or they preserve the manuscript, or it piques their curiosity to learn more. One character uses it to feel a connection with someone they loved and goes on to write it as a play for children.

They each show astonishing courage and fortitude in seemingly hopeless situations and there is also a theme of homecoming or finding a home and love.

This was a book that we all found difficult to get into and it polarised the group. Half of us, once we got past the first forty or fifty pages, really enjoyed it, gave it 5/5 and said that we would be happy to buy a copy to re-read. Others found they couldn’t get into it all, finding it too confusing with so many different timelines or found it too fantastical for their tastes.