Cloud Cuckoo Land

Five lives, eight centuries, and one battered book. In 1453, as the Ottoman army closes on the walls of Constantinople, an orphaned girl named Anna teaches herself to read Greek; beyond those walls Omeir, a boy born with a cleft lip, is swept into the besieging army and will leave it a deserter.

In present-day Lakeport, Idaho, an octogenarian named Zeno Ninis works with a group of schoolchildren on a text he has translated from a crumbling Greek codex — in the same small public library into which Seymour Stuhlman, a teenager radicalised by the destruction of the woods behind his house, has carried a bomb.

And decades from now, aboard the interstellar ship Argos, a girl called Konstance meets that same story, watched over by the vessel's artificial intelligence, Sibyl.

Their common thread is Cloud Cuckoo Land itself: an invented ancient tale, attributed to the Greek writer Antonius Diogenes, in which Aethon longs to be turned into a bird and carried to a paradise city in the clouds. Dedicated to "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come", it is a novel about the fragile, stubborn business of getting a story from one century into the next — and about the people, usually unremarkable and usually unthanked, who do the carrying.