Today’s GalleyCrush is Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, forthcoming from Scribner on September 28, 2021.
Perfect pitch: “From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most best-selling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story.”
First lines: “A fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. A mass of curls haloes her head; her socks are full of holes. This is Konstance.”
Book buzz: “This is a glory of a book. As its cast of characters moves us across continents and ages from ancient Greece to the present and beyond, we fall in love with the best of them—and the worst. Cloud Cuckoo Land is impossible to put down and once finished, life-changing, the kind of book you hope will come your way but almost never does. An absolute masterpiece.” —Betsy Burton of the King’s English Bookshop
Cover credit: Jonathan Bush
Book notes: Hardcover, fiction, 656 pages.
Author bio: Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times best-seller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
