Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a sweeping novel that connects five characters across eight centuries through a shared ancient Greek codex. The story interweaves narratives from fifteenth-century Constantinople, where an orphaned girl named Anna discovers the codex amidst the city's fall, and present-day Idaho, where an elderly man, Zeno, attempts to translate the fragments with a group of fifth-graders. It also features Konstance, a teenager on a starship traveling to a new planet in the twenty-second century. The novel explores themes of preservation, war, and the enduring power of storytelling, all linked by the mythical tale within the codex.