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Meanwhile, a boy named Seymour in present-day Lakeport, Idaho, is devastated when a forest that he loves is razed to make room for a housing development. After Omeir and his oxen are conscripted into the Ottoman army to help drag a super-cannon (one of the largest cannons ever constructed) to attack Constantinople, his path and Anna’s intersect. There’s Omeir, an oxherd from the mountains of what we now call Bulgaria, who grows up on a diet of his grandfather’s whimsical fables. She chafes against her over-structured life, and longs to learn to read. There’s Anna, who lives and works in an embroidery house in 15th century Constantinople. What is it about seemingly every human generation in seemingly every culture that we tell stories about traveling to better, prettier, more equitable places in far-off lands?Ī: It consists, really, of five novels-in-one, each braided around the others, and each of Cloud Cuckoo Land’s five protagonists are connected through time by a sixth novel: an ancient text by Antonius Diogenes (that I invented) about a shepherd’s comical journey to a utopian city in the sky. In my novel, I hope to embrace the full range of contemporary and historical meanings of the phrase, from a beautiful utopia where there is no suffering, to an absurd and over-optimistic fantasy. “A True Story,” to a 1925 Robert Graves poem (“ Kingfishers, when they die, To far Cloud-Cuckoo pastures fly”), to the 2014 LEGO movie. In the centuries since, a ‘cloud cuckoo land’ has been used to describe any number of fanciful worlds, employed in works from Lucian’s second-century A.D.

In “The Birds,” two heroes, Trustyfriend and Goodhope, decide to leave Athens because it has become too corrupt, and-with the help of the world’s birds-build a better city in the sky, halfway between the realm of humans and the realm of the gods.

A: ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’ ( Νεϕελοκοκκυγία) was a phrase invented by the comic playwright Aristophanes’ 2,400 years ago in “The Birds,” one his few plays that survives to this day.