In store now! Compass by Mathias Enard
Ahead of the release of Enard’s forthcoming The Annual Banquet of the Gravedigger’s Guild (October 28th - we’ve read it and it's incredible) we wanted to highlight Enard’s prior masterpiece, Compass.
Franz Ritter, a bedbound and increasingly unwell musicologist reflects on his journey through the Middle East from his sleepless window in Vienna. Obsessed with the beauty of Aleppo, the music of Tehran, and the architecture of Damascus, his deeply humane, humorous and even profound musics centre around a decades spanning unrequited love affair.
Achingly beautiful, and replate with gorgeous, exhilarating prose, Compass is perhaps the greatest novel of our young century. A must read.
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Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Compass by Mathias Enard
Paperback £15.99
As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, Orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, COMPASS is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out - like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow.
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
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