Cloud Cuckoo Land

Moving from the blues and country music scene of East Texas in the late 1970s to the underground rock scene of the Northeast in the 1980s, Cloud Cuckoo Land tells the story of a young female street musician's search for home -- and the unlikely place where she finds one.

Miri's travels are told in a masterful first-person voice that grows from girlhood to adulthood over the course of the book: from an only child raised by her grandmother, to life on the streets sleeping in warehouses and scamming for meals, to her unlikely destiny in Philadelphia. There, as a homeless busker who owns nothing but a lovely voice, she meets Jamie, a gay man who could have studied music at Juilliard but dreamed of a life in rock and roll instead. It’s not long before Miri and Jamie are performing and living together in a unique partnership, teaching each other important lessons about music and about life.

They call their duet Cloud Cuckoo Land, a sort of bird heaven, a name that describes their musical dreams and recalls the kaleidoscopic landscape of Miri’s coming of age. At turns hilarious and touching, Lisa Borders has crafted an unforgettable tale of two people, thrown together by chance, making their way together.