Awards

• Short-listed for International Booker Prize 2017 (UK)
• Winner of Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2017
• Winner of Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2017 (Germany)
• Winner of Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding 2017.
• Winner of Premio Gregor von Rezzori 2017 (Italy)
• Winner of Prix Goncourt 2015
• Winner of Prix Goncourt 2015.

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9781910695234

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Reviews

'[T]he most brazenly lapel-grabbing French writer since Michel Houellebecq.' - Leo Robson, NEW STATESMAN

Author Information

Mathias Enard, born in 1972, studied Persian and Arabic and spent long periods in the Middle East. He has lived in Barcelona for about fifteen years, interrupted in 2013 by a writing residency in Berlin. He won several awards for Zone, including the Prix du Livre Inter and the Prix Decembre, and won the Liste Goncourt/Le Choix de l'Orient, the Prix litteraire de la Porte Doree, and the Prix du Roman-News for Street of Thieves. He won the 2015 Prix Goncourt for Compass. Charlotte Mandell has translated fiction, poetry, and philosophy from the French, including works by Proust, Flaubert, Genet, Maupassant and Blanchot.

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