This is NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaung. Over the summer, I got a package in the mail

from a friend. It was a copy of Anthony Doer's 2014 book, All the Light We Cannot See, and it came with a note

that said something like, this book is not a gift, it's alone. I expect it back because it's got all my

tears in it. It's funny,

our connection to books. I suppose I don't have to tell you that, but it's a major theme in

Anthony Doer's new book, Cloud Cuckoo Land. He spoke with NPR's Scott Simon about it.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors.

On our new show, Sources and Methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people,

helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.

Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Anthony Doer, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015 with his last novel, All the Light

We Cannot See.

As a new novel that ties together stories from medieval Constantinople, a contemporary small-town

library held at gunpoint by a teenage

environmentalist, and a spaceship in the next century. Let's not delay in asking him to read a section.

On the fourth hill of the city we call Constantinople, but which the inhabitants at the time

simply called the city, across the street from the convent of St. Teofano,

the Empress, in the once great embroidery house of Nicholas Caliphates, lives an orphan named

Anna. She does not speak until she's three. Then it's all questions all the time. Anna and her older

sister Maria sleep in a one window cell barely large enough for a

...