Nan Graham, his longtime editor, said that where other writers might live by the diktat “write what you know,” for Doerr, it’s “write what you want to know.” His interest was first sparked by the walls of Constantinople, which stood for nearly a thousand years before the Ottoman invasion. It was named to the National Book Awards fiction longlist on Friday.

Holding these pieces together is an ancient Greek text (one Doerr invented), the “Cloud Cuckoo Land” of the title, which passes through and affects the lives of the book’s five main characters. This book contains three story arcs - one set in the late 15th century at the fall of Constantinople, another in present-day Idaho and a third on a Noah’s ark-like spaceship heading toward a possibly inhabitable planet. Similar to “All the Light,” his new novel has short chapters and is propelled by disparate characters who must somehow intersect, but like a juggler adding three and then four more balls, he’s raised the level of difficulty. Without the salmon, the soil is diminished, and the trees are more susceptible to fires and invasive species. Bears and eagles used to eat the fish, and the entrails they dropped enriched the soil, helping trees and shrubs grow. These mountains were the headwaters for rivers that were once the endpoint of a 900-mile migration of wild salmon, but a few decades ago dams were built on the lower Snake River, making it near impossible for them to pass. “Take the salmon,” he said, stopping amid the blackened carcasses of fallen trees. But what bugged him wasn’t just the visibility: A fire a thousand miles away was putting smoke in our throats here, the kind of connection he wished people would spend more time thinking about. He felt bad about the air since our view of the mountains, covered with spiky pine trees, was less than pristine. He normally lives in Boise with his wife and twin teenage sons, but he has a second home in Ketchum, just a short walk away from the squat midcentury house where in 1961 Ernest Hemingway turned a shotgun on himself.ĭoerr, 47, was making quick headway as I panted behind him. I’d flown to this ski-resort town to meet Doerr - best known as the author of the Pulitzer-winning 2014 novel, “ All the Light We Cannot See” - to talk about his new book, “ Cloud Cuckoo Land,” which will be released by Scribner on Sept.

My problem was not so much the air quality, but how little of the stuff there seemed to be. The fires on the West Coast were responsible. KETCHUM, Idaho - Anthony Doerr kept apologizing for the air.Īnd it’s true that a yellowish haze, which blotted out the sun and filled our noses with a campfire smell, hung over the Sawtooth Mountains last month as we hiked to Titus Lake, 9,050 feet above sea level.

Anthony doerr all the light