Cloud Cuckoo Land

Constantinople, 1453. Anna, an orphan living among women who embroider clerical robes, secretly learns to read and discovers a damaged Greek codex about Aethon, a shepherd who dreams of reaching a paradise in the clouds. Beyond the city walls, Omeir has been conscripted with his oxen into the Ottoman army preparing its final assault. Their lives approach one another as the siege threatens the city, its inhabitants and the manuscripts preserved within it.

Centuries later, Korean War veteran Zeno translates the same fragmented tale and rehearses local children in a library adaptation while a troubled teenager named Seymour prepares an act of violence nearby. In a distant future, Konstance searches a virtual archive aboard the interstellar vessel Argos for the truth behind the story her father taught her. The novel links these lives through the survival of books, asking how stories preserve memory, offer refuge and carry human experience across war, ecological crisis and immense spans of time.