From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time, comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are trying to figure out the world around them: Anna and Omeir, on opposite sides of the formidable city walls during the 1453 siege of Constantinople; teenage idealist Seymour in an attack on a public library in present day Idaho; and Konstance, on an interstellar ship bound for an exoplanet, decades from now. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, and Konstance are dreamers and outsiders who find resourcefulness and hope in the midst of peril. An ancient text--the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky--provides solace and mystery to these unforgetta
This new book provides an excellent resource on the nature of European warfare from the outbreak of the Valois-Habsburg wars to the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
While their victory ensured the Turks' survival, the conquest of Constantinople marked the end of Byzantine civilization for the Greeks, by triggering the scholarly exodus that caused an influx of Cla