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Fourth Estate will publish Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the Light We Cannot See (Fourth Estate, 2014).
Executive publisher David Roth-Ey and publishing director Nicholas Pearson acquired British Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown on behalf of Amanda Urban at ICM Partners.
The synopsis reads: "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 struggling to survive and finding resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril."
Pearson commented: "For the millions of fans of All the Light We Cannot See, we are thrilled to announce that the wait is nearly over: Anthony Doerr's new novel will be published on 28th September 2021. Cloud Cuckoo Land braids together characters across time — from the Siege of Constantinople to the present day and beyond – whose stories are completely absorbing. It is an astonishing novel of worlds within worlds, written on a grand scale but delicate and intimate and every bit as heart-wrenching as its predecessor."
Doerr said: "The world we’re handing our kids brims with challenges: climate instability, pandemics, disinformation. 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."
Cloud Cuckoo Land will be published on 8th September 2021.