Compass (Shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize)

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 Orientalist 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. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt this is mathias enard's most ambitious novel since Zone.