In this ambitious follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Light We Cannot See,” Anthony Doerr delivers in a big way. A huge sweep of a story, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” features no fewer than five plotlines and as many key characters contending with big events, challenges, and questions. 

In some hands, this could have been a big mess. The good news: Doerr’s creation lifts off quickly, soars, and then, like the various wildfowl wheeling through the story, lands with practiced finesse.

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” may sound to some like a ridiculous title, but readers paging through the book’s opening pages will discover – or be reminded – that the name comes from Aristophanes’ 2,400-year-old play “The Birds.” 

Here, “Cloud Cuckoo Land” refers to Doerr’s own made-up myth about a hapless shepherd named Aethon journeying to a utopian city “floated in the heavens.” Purportedly written by Diogenes in the first century, the tale threads through the book; fragments of text from recovered pages introduce each chapter. 

In ways both subtle and overt, the myth connects the novel’s chief characters, all of whom face their own journeys in vastly different parts and periods of our world.

There’s Konstance, a 14-year-old aboard a ship called the Argos decades in the future; she shares her quarters with a filament-and-light Artificial Intelligence entity named Sybil. Part of a select group escaping climate-battered Earth for a habitable planet light-years away, Konstance faces the twin challenges of survival and fact-finding after stumbling on a mystery in the ship’s virtual-reality library.

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