City in the Clouds

Novel City in the Clouds by the author of There Are Lights We Cannot See

Thirteen-year-old Anna makes her living as an embroiderer in Constantinople and is fascinated by the story of the city in the clouds. On the other side of the walls, the boy Omeir prepares to lay siege to the city with the Sultan's army. It's 1453. Five hundred years later, Zénón, an octogenarian in his eighties, and five schoolchildren are rehearsing a play based on an ancient story in an Idaho library. But a bomb is ticking among the shelves of books, planted by Seymour, a young idealist who has felt trapped all his life.

And in the not-too-distant future, a girl named Constance, trapped in a sealed chamber aboard a spaceship, tries to write down on scraps of paper the story of the naive shepherd Aithon that her father told her.
Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zénon and Constance are dreamers and outcasts in the eyes of others, who can find hope and wit in the face of the greatest danger. Although it doesn't seem like it at first glance, their lives are perfectly connected. City in the Clouds is a beautiful novel about how important it is to care about something - a book, the Earth, the human heart.