CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Anthony Doerr ( All the Light We Cannot See) returns with Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner), $30, about characters connected by a long-lost ancient Greek manuscript through a mingling of time frames—15th-century Constantinople, presentday Idaho and a future spaceship. It’s also, he says, a tribute to librarians, the “stewards of human memory. Without them, we lose perhaps our most important windows into the human journey.” Here, he shares why he likes blending worlds and what he’s reading this fall. —Dillon Dodson

Why write about the preservation of storytelling? Probably because I’m getting close to 50, and though I still feel and behave like a kid most of the time, my eyesight is fading and I can apparently injure myself while sleeping. I’m realizing that everything—youth, hairlines, memories, civilizations—fades. And the amazing technology that is a printed book seems to be one of the few human inventions that has outlived generations.

Why “cloud cuckoo land” as the title and theme in this novel? It has come to mean both a delightful fantasyland with no suffering and an absurd pipe dream unconnected to reality. It’s considered a waste of time to live in a cloud cuckoo land, but isn’t there also something beautiful about the human propensity to dream of better places?

What do you enjoy about connecting characters separated by geography or time? It feels as though every day, science discovers more about how interconnected everything is. Not feeling well? Could be a disruption to the trillions of microbes living inside your gut. Hazy skies in New York? Coul` be wild fires in British Columbia. I love to echo and dramatize interdependencies.

What book do you most recommend to friends and family? Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams [Scribner, $18] by Matthew Walker. Sleep is such a fascinating riddle. The book is a wonderful reminder of how much we still don’t know.

What new books are you excited to read? I’ve already ordered Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint [Graywolf Press, $27], Colm Tóibín’s The Magician [Scribner, $28] and Lauren Groff’s Matrix [Riverhead, $28]. All three are absolutely exquisite writers.

Do you have a favorite book of 2021? So far, it’s Lucy Jones’ Losing Eden [Pantheon, $27], a survey of the latest science on why we’re healthier and happier when we spend time outdoors.

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