Cloud Cuckoo Land
ANTHONY DOERR
(4th Estate, 622pp, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Anthony Doerr’s hugely successful, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of 2014, All the Light We Cannot See, broke records by spending 130 weeks on the best-seller lists. Its plotting was intricate but it was, at least, set within only one era – the Second World War. Cloud Cuckoo Land spans centuries. Yet Doerr (inset) juggles his five main protagonists and their lives with such skill that we never get lost.

This long, gripping novel contains many threads including climate change, disability, a deadly virus, a coming-out story, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 – something for everyone, in fact.

Each section starts with an extract from an ancient Greek text, a manuscript with magical properties that, ostensibly, connects the characters (the goat-skin covered codex is rescued by Anna, a girl who escapes the Constantinople siege) but really it’s the power of Doerr’s narrative, rather than this device, that holds us in thrall.