Cloud Cuckoo Land

In 15th-century Constantinople, a girl named Anna is living in a convent of nuns with her sister Maria. Largely, Anna runs errands for the nuns while Maria does needlework. One day, Anna hears a tutor named Licinius reading The Odyssey to a group of students. Anna convinces Licinius to tutor her in return for wine and often stops by to learn Greek. Anna learns quickly, but Licinius soon grows old and dies. Just before breathing his last breath, Licinius gifts Anna a few manuscripts, which she treasures. However, Kalaphates, the master of the convent where Anna lives, discovers the manuscripts and, thinking they are Maria’s, assaults Maria for possessing them. As a result, Maria is left with a brain injury and, over the next few months, her health steadily declines. Anna tries to help Maria by salvaging manuscripts from a ruined priory and selling them to Italian men who plan to bring them to the Urbino library in Italy. Anna uses the money she makes to buy Maria holy water. However, Maria’s health continues to decline. One day, Anna finds a manuscript for Antonius Diogenes’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. She tries to sell it to the Italians, but they leave the city before she gets the chance due to the impending Ottoman siege. As the Ottomans begin attacking the city and Maria’s health continues to get worse, Anna reads Maria Cloud Cuckoo Land, which provides them with much needed comfort. Eventually, Maria dies, and the Ottomans take the city. However, Anna manages to escape without being captured.

Along roughly the same timeline, a few hundred miles outside the walls of Constantinople, a boy named Omeir is born with a cleft palate. Because Omeir’s village is superstitious, they drive Omeir and his family out of the village, thinking Omeir will bring bad luck. Other than his cleft palate, Omeir grows up healthy. He and his family start a farm, which eventually produces two prized calves: Tree and Moonlight. Years later, when Omeir is a young man, the Ottoman army recruits him to aid them in the siege of Constantinople. Omeir, who has never left the mountain range where he lives, leaves his home with Tree and Moonlight by his side. Eventually, he reaches Constantinople and aids the Ottomans with their siege. However, they treat him poorly and are too rough on Tree and Moonlight. Although Omeir does everything he can to protect Tree and Moonlight, eventually the Ottomans work them too hard, and they die. When the Ottomans make their final push to seize Constantinople, Omeir abandons them.

Outside the walls of the city, Omeir coincidentally meets Anna, who is also fleeing the Ottomans. Omeir takes Anna back to his village, and they become husband and wife. Anna reads Cloud Cuckoo Land to their children, which remains her prized possession. After the children grow old and move out of the house, Anna dies. Shortly after, a storm hits Omeir’s village and damages part of the manuscript. Not wanting it to come to any more harm, Omeir takes it to the library in Urbino for safekeeping.

In the first half of the 20th century, a boy named Zeno grows up in Lakeport, Idaho, where Zeno’s father moved after taking a job. Zeno does not like Lakeport but loves the library and quickly develops a passion for books. While in Lakeport, Zeno’s father begins dating an unlikeable woman named Alma Boydstun. Not long after, World War II begins, and Zeno’s father goes to war while Zeno is left with Mrs. Boydstun. Zeno’s father dies in the war, leaving Mrs. Boydstun to raise Zeno. As a young man, Zeno discovers he is gay, but he does not say anything to anyone because homosexuality is heavily stigmatized. Eventually, Zeno grows into a young man and, like his father, becomes a soldier.

Zeno serves in the Korean War and, before long, ends up in a prisoner of war camp. There, he meets Rex Browning, a former teacher with a passion for Greek language and culture. Zeno befriends Rex and soon their friendship also blossoms into an unspoken romance, though neither acts on their feelings for the other. Rex and Zeno plan to escape the POW camp together, but, when the time comes to put their plan into action, Zeno abandons Rex and lets him go off on his own. Soon after, Zeno is freed from the camp and goes home to Idaho. There, he regularly writes letters to the military in an attempt to determine whether Rex is alive. However, he gets no response. During this time, he also begins working a menial job while also taking care of Mrs. Boydstun, whose health has begun to decline.

Many years later, Zeno finally hears back from Rex, who is alive and living in London. Zeno travels to London and visits Rex. He discovers Rex is already in a relationship with a man named Hillary. Disappointed, Zeno leaves London without telling Rex how he feels about him. For several years, they remain pen pals, but they only discuss Greek, which Zeno has decided to learn. Although Zeno eventually becomes quite proficient in Greek, his relationship with Rex never changes. One day, Hillary contacts Zeno to tell him that Rex has died. Zeno takes the news hard, though he continues studying Greek.

Time passes and eventually Mrs. Boydstun dies. Meanwhile, Zeno grows into an old man himself. After retiring, Zeno spends much of his time at the Lakeport Library. There, he meets Sharif, a young librarian who tells him that new technology recently allowed translators to get their hands on a manuscript of Cloud Cuckoo Land (the same manuscript that belonged to Anna). Zeno decides to try his hand at translating the manuscript, though he does not have much luck until he decides to involve the children at the Lakeport Library, who inspire him. Eventually, Zeno decides to turn Cloud Cuckoo Land into a play, which the children will perform, and it becomes one of the highlights of his life.

In the early 2000s, also in Lakeport, Idaho, a single mother named Bunny is raising her son, Seymour, who has a hard time at school because he regularly experiences sensory overload. Despite his challenges, Seymour is smart and reads regularly. He makes friends with an owl he meets in the woods (Trustyfriend) and begins reading about owls in his spare time. However, problems arise when a company named Eden’s Gate Realty begins building new developments in Seymour’s area. Eden’s Gate Realty tears down the forest around Seymour’s house, killing Trustyfriend. Additionally, Seymour’s teachers become less sensitive to Seymour’s needs, further isolating him. As a high school student, Seymour becomes obsessed with the negative impact humans have on the environment. He becomes involved with an eco-terrorist group that encourages him to build a bomb and place it in the Lakeport Library, which sits next to the headquarters of Eden’s Gate Realty.

On February 20th, 2020, Zeno is staging a production of Cloud Cuckoo Land at the Lakeport Library. As Zeno and the children have their dress rehearsal for the play, Seymour sneaks into the library and plants a bomb. Sharif finds Seymour’s backpack (which contains the bomb) sitting in the library and tries to return it to him. Panicking, Seymour shoots Sharif in the shoulder. When Zeno realizes something is happening downstairs, he hides the children and does his best to keep them quiet. Eventually, Zeno walks downstairs and confronts Seymour, seeing that Sharif needs an ambulance. Before Seymour can do anything, one of his bombs begins its countdown to detonation. Zeno picks up the bomb and runs out of the library with it, killing himself but saving everyone else.

Seymour goes to jail for what he has done and becomes a model prisoner. Because of his good behavior, he is allowed to work on a program that the Ilium Corporation is developing, which will later become Atlas. Atlas is a virtual reality rendition of Earth that users can explore. It is Seymour’s job to remove everything unseemly from the images the Ilium Corporation has captured, essentially sanitizing everything negative going on in the world. At first, Seymour goes along with his employer’s wishes. However, he eventually goes back and adds owls into the images he has sanitized. Whenever someone interacts with the owls, they are able to see the uncensored version of the image.

After many decades have passed, Seymour tries to make amends for the past by creating a bound version of Cloud Cuckoo Land, which he gives to the children (who are now adults) who were in the library the day he tried to bomb it. One of the children is Rachel Wilson, the grandmother of a girl named Konstance who now lives on the Argos, a spaceship made by the Ilium Corporation and run by an AI named Sybil. As a young girl, Konstance enjoys life on the Argos, which is headed to Beta Oph2, a distant planet. At age 10, Konstance gets access to the Atlas and another Ilium program called the Library, which supposedly grants her access to everything humankind has ever written. Along with her access to this information comes the realization that she will live her entire life on the Argos, as the ship will not reach Beta Oph2 until she is dead. Still, Konstance is satisfied with her life until a pandemic breaks out on the ship. The pandemic kills everyone except Konstance, who ends up locked in a vault with only Sybil for company.

Konstance spends over a year in the vault trying to figure out what to do. While exploring Konstance’s father’s childhood home in the Atlas, Konstance sees the copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land Seymour gave Rachel. While researching the book, she discovers that there are parts of the Atlas she can alter if she finds the owls Seymour placed there. Eventually, Konstance manages to copy down all of Cloud Cuckoo Land, though she does not record it into Sybil’s library. While in the vault, Konstance also delves into the history of the Argos and its mission. Eventually, she discovers that the Argos never left Earth; rather, it was merely a test that the Ilium Corporation created. Upon realizing this, Konstance tricks Sybil into letting her leave the vault and then uses an axe to destroy the wall of the ship. As Konstance suspected, she is still on Earth. Nearby, she discovers a small village where she eventually finds a husband and has children. She reads her children her version of the Cloud Cuckoo Land manuscript.