RaveThe Guardian (UK)... a deep lungful of fresh air – and a gift of a novel ... Each character’s story is graceful and suspenseful in itself, but it is the deftness, cunning and feeling with which the author braids them around the tale of the dim-witted lamebrain who longs to be a bird that make this book the simultaneously risky and necessary wonder it is ... Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land argues that love, care and putting things back together are the best uses of human energy. Yet this is a novel in which work isn’t just a costume its characters are wearing over their emotional lives ... This is a novel so full that, if it can be said to be \'about\' anything, perhaps it is about how things survive by chance, and through love. But the book is also keenly aware of the fact that humans have basically exhausted our chances, and it is time for a fierce and tenacious love to step up – by sharing and passing on what is mended and changed, like Diogenes’s book, with its delights and consolations – to save what we still have on Earth, and what is ours, as well as what we enjoy here, though it isn’t ours ... With all its tenderness for human life and animal life, and libraries, this novel nevertheless acknowledges that civilisation continues to insist on not going anywhere without packing its poisons.