Talking with author Anthony Doerr on the phone, you can hear he’s never far from a laugh. His work as a writer might be deep and serious, but he’s not particularly serious in his daily life.

And this holiday season he has a lot to bring him joy and much to be grateful for — partly thanks to the success of his first novel since winning a Pulitzer Prize, “Cloud Cuckoo Land.” The book came out in September and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been on The New York Times Best Sellers List for seven weeks, and it hit the Notable Books of 2021 list.

After his World War II epic “All the Light We Cannot See” won the 2015 Pulitzer, the Boise novelist — Tony to his local readers — entered into the world spotlight. One of the most celebrated reads of the past decade, the book earned Doerr millions of readers — famously including then-President Barack Obama — who were anticipating his third novel.

“The fact that readers were waiting for my book, that there are people out there who want to read it, is such a gift,” Doerr said.

Now, viewers can also get excited. Netflix is developing “All the Light” into a four-part miniseries, written and shepherded by Steven Knight, creator of “Peaky Blinders.”

“Everything is still early, of course, but I think Steven has done a great job with the material,” Doerr said. “I’m so thrilled that Netflix and the producers are running a worldwide search for a low-vision or blind actor to play Marie-Laure. They’re starting to talk about locations in Europe, so it’s inching a bit closer now.”

If Doerr has changed with all of this hubbub, it’s by an imperceptible amount.

Yes, the clothes are a bit tonier and the house is a bit bigger. The national press he receives is much more substantial. From “CBS Sunday Morning” to “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” he has moved well into the national spotlight. But when in Boise — or his favorite hangout, McCall — things adjust back to normal.

He takes morning runs on the Foothill trails that braid the land behind his home in the Highlands, a ritual that keeps him grounded in the Idaho landscape. He makes the trip to his North End office, where he wrote both of these books over nearly 20 years. He shoots basketball with his children. He signs the occasional autograph at the grocery store.

Doerr also stays connected to the Idaho literary community, where he developed as a writer. He will headline The Cabin’s Readings & Conversations on Jan. 13, 2022. It will mark the return of a series that brings nationally and internationally known authors to Boise to the Morrison Center stage. There also will be a virtual option.

“Life doesn’t really change at all,” Doerr said. “Every time you sit down to write something, it’s the same grind. I still live with dead ends and deadlines, that’s one side. The other is, now we can afford to send the kids to college, and I can feel like a bit of an ambassador for the state when I’m out traveling, and then I get to leave all the chaos behind and focus on being here with my family. But you still pick up the dog poop and the kids’ socks.”

Boise is where Doerr transformed from a struggling writer to a lauded author to one of the big names in literary fiction. And with “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” he has taken another bold step forward in that world. He is in many ways a writer coming of age.

“This is my middle-age book,” the 47-year-old said.

When “All the Light” came out in 2014, Doerr quipped: “Growing up sucks. Because how do you grow and not repeat yourself? How do you capture new readers and also don’t frustrate people who’ve been faithful to you all along? It’s about finding projects that push you: setting things in first person, setting them in the future or trying historical fiction, and writing in ways that don’t just make you feel safe.”

Doerr did none of that. He took a leap, Rediscovered Books owner Laura Delaney said. The independent book shop is one of Doerr’s staunchest supporters, and he is one of theirs. Doerr partnered with Rediscovered at its Caldwell store to sign all 5,000 copies of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” that he personalized for distribution to benefit independent bookstores across the country. So far he has helped raise thousands for The Cabin’s children’s programs, Delaney said.

“What I respect so much about Tony is that with all the commercial success he’s had, it would have been easy to rest and create something commercial. Instead, he doubled down and created a big work of literary fiction,” Delaney said. “And he’s reaching people who would never pick up a book like this. It’s not light reading, so what I tell people is to just keep reading. It’s big and meaningful, and it stays with you.”

New York Times reviewer Marcel Theroux summed it up like this: “It’s a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences.”

“Cloud Cuckoo Land” is an ambitious book with a title that definitely is a talker. Its language digs deeply into storytelling traditions, and in Doerr’s signature style, weaves captivating sentences and evocative descriptions that build worlds in your imagination.

The threads that run through it are the same threads that connect Doerr to the world around him. In fact, they run through his entire body of work: a fascination with science, technology and the natural world; the importance of tending the planet for future generations; and mostly the importance of stories — from how we tell them to how we nurture and preserve them.

“The book is really a love letter to books, and librarians are the heroes,” Doerr said. “Stories preserve our collective memory and can carry us through difficult times. And allow voices to be heard centuries after their death.”

It spans eons of time, miles of geography and — as in “All the Light” — it tells its tale from more than one perspective.

“The architecture of this book was more challenging,” Doerr said. “ ‘All the Light’ was like a tennis match, back and forth between the two characters. This is five (characters) plus backstories. It was an enormous puzzle. It’s like spinning plates — I had to keep going back to touch each one to keep it spinning.”

He drew maps and diagrams of his characters’ paths to keep track of 15th century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a 23rd century spaceship named Arogos with a computer named Sybil — nods to Greek mythology and the epics of Homer.

Doerr discovered the kernel that would become “Cloud Cuckoo Land” while writing and researching his previous book. One of its settings is Saint-Malo, an ancient walled city in France. That’s how he came upon the history of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, a walled city that stood for 1,100 years.

Behind the wall, its rulers created a library where scholars and writers from around the known world were free to read and copy down stories by hand. That ended in the 1450s when the Ottoman Empire destroyed the city after a 53-day siege — and much of the trove of stories was destroyed.

That’s a pivotal event in history and in Doerr’s book.

One of the texts thought to be lost with the fall of Constantinople is Aristophanes Diogenes’ play “The Birds,” Doerr said.

“He was a really hilarious writer, and most of his plays are gone, although seven survive,” Doerr said. “He wrote a play called ‘The Birds,’ which might be the original buddy comedy, and it may have included a journey to the moon, which would make it the first Western sci-fi.”

In the story, two fools want to leave Athens because there are too many lawyers, so they go to “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” a mystical place that is halfway between Olympus, home of the gods, and Earth.

“But like all Utopian narratives, it caves in,” Doerr said. “They start eating the birds that help them build the city, of course.”

Today the term cloud-cuckoo-land means “a realm of fantasy or of whimsical or foolish behavior,” according to Miriam-Webster.com. But in Doerr’s hands, the farce becomes the connective tissue that binds the stories together.

Each character touches or is touched by Doerr’s version of Diogenes’ story. And each discovers it in a library of their time — a stone fortress in ruins, a rural library in Central Idaho, a futuristic virtual library on a spaceship traveling to a new world.

The library in fictional Lakeport, Idaho, one of the settings in Doerr’s book, is modeled after the McCall library.

The book also touches on climate change and the effect of disruptive technologies on nature. It’s a topic that Doerr takes to heart and that pops up in much of his work. It underscores the devastation a giant cannon can cause on the walls of Constantinople, the way the bulldozers plow over ancient trees in Idaho to make way for a subdivision, and the developments that force people to leave the planet and find a new home.

“We live in a world where the temperature is rising all the time. Can we deliver a world that is intact to our children?” Doerr said. “These stories are how we transmit human culture through time. Maybe, the preservation of these old stories is the best we can do? Otherwise, they’re gone.”

Doerr grew up in Cleveland writing stories about his toys and exploring the world through the lens provided by his science-teacher mom. He started visiting Boise when he met his now-wife Shauna at renowned Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine — a private liberal arts school whose famous graduates include Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The couple moved here in the late 1990s and were living here when his first story collection, “The Shell Collector,” was released in 2002.

Living in Idaho, Doerr fell in love with the Boise Foothills, mountain biking, fly fishing and especially trips to McCall, where he is a regular. He had the struggles that nearly all writers endure, getting rejection letters and trying to find income. He taught at Boise State and at summer camps.

As he honed his craft and produced several story collections — including the award-winning “The Memory Wall” — he won prestigious fellowships, grants and international prizes. And he wrote his first novel, “About Grace,” about a man whose gift for weather prediction is a blessing and a curse. In 2007, he served as Idaho’s Writer in Residence, a two-year appointment that took him all over the state. He built a reputation for writing moving and evocative short stories. He also wrote travel pieces for Conde Naste, contributed to The New York Times editorial page and reviewed science books for The Boston Globe.

In 2011, he gained international attention when his short story “The Deep” won the London Sunday Times Story Prize. Then he followed that up with a pair of celebrated works of fiction — and yes, he’s got another one in mind, he said.

“I’ve got a couple of ideas,” Doerr said. “I’m looking forward to being creative again, and not being Anthony, so much, and just being Tony, and spending this last year with my kids before they go off on their own.”

Doerr is a crucial part of the local arts ecosystem and an inspiration to his peers, said author Brady Udall, who wrote “The Lonely Polygamist” and also is a former Idaho Writer in Residence.

“As all good writers do, he seems to be expanding his scope, pushing the limits of his abilities and imagination,” Udall wrote in an email. “At a time when American fiction seems to be looking inward, Tony’s work is looking outward, even beyond the bounds of our species, our world. While so many are embracing grievance and cynicism, he’s writing from a place of wonder and generosity.”

Kurt Zwolfer, director of The Cabin, said having Doerr as a Boise resident is a huge boon to the literary community.

Doerr’s career has grown along with The Cabin’s status in the national literary scene. In his time in Boise, Doerr has gone from teaching children’s workshops there to being the featured author at the annual gala. He’s done multiple readings to raise funds for The Cabin’s programs, and now he’s headlining the return to a live performance at the Morrison Center.

“Tony is now one of the leading literary voices in the country, and he’s never forgotten us,” Zwolfer said.

You can hear from Doerr live at The Cabin’s Readings & Conversations, 8 p.m. Jan. 13, 2022, at the Morrison Center, 2201 Cesar Chavez Lane. Tickets are $25.50 and $40.50 at MorrisonCenter.com and TheCabin.org.