Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel

"In 15th century Constantinople, a young girl scales an abandoned monastery looking to steal books. In the 1940s, in Lakeport, Idaho, a boy follows his father to a new job, a new life and, eventually, a new war. In 2020, a troubled teenager sits in his car outside the Lakeport public library, a gun in his pocket, a bomb in the backpack beside him. In 2146, on a generation ship headed for a new home on Beta Oph2, a girl waits inside a sealed room, hiding from a deadly plague, her only company an artificial intelligence called Sybil. These characters are linked, brilliantly, impossibly, through words, stories, libraries and, most notably, an invented manuscript (for which the novel is named) about a man who gets turned into a goat, a fish and a bird while searching for an imaginary city in the sky."