Noah's Compass by Anne Tyler
With the humour and poignancy of her classic The Accidental Tourist (though with a protagonist who doesn't venture far from home) Anne Tyler's brilliant new novel tells the story of a year in the life of Liam Pennywell, a man in his 61st year. A classical pedant, he's just been 'let go' from his schoolteaching job and downsizes to a tiny little out of town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on the first night, tucking himself in tightly... and wakes up in hospital unable to recall how he got there. Widowed, re-married, divorced and the father of three daughters, Liam is a man who is proud of his recall but has learned to dodge issues and skirt adventure. Obsessed with the gap in his memory, however, he sets out to uncover what happened to him, and finds instead an unusual woman with secrets of her own. His ex-wife, sensible Barbara, and his daughters worry about him but Liam blunders on. This is a novel about memory and memory loss, about incidents and relationships which open up sight lines into a painful past long dead for a man who becomes aware that he hasn't really been present in his own life... There's late-flowering love, but that brings its own thorny problems. The title is the metaphor for Liam's life. One of Liam's three daughters is a born-again Christian (much to Liam's sceptical bewilderment) and her son, Jonah, colours in Bible stories. His grandson asks Liam if Noah had a gas-driven boat or a sailboat. Neither, replies Liam, he wasn't going anywhere, so he didn't need a compass either: he was just bobbing up and down, staying afloat, because the whole world was covered in water....
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread and Vinegar Girl. In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780701184247 |
| ISBN 10 | 0701184248 |
| Title | Noah's Compass |
| Author | Anne Tyler |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Vintage Publishing |
| Year published | 2009-08-06 |
| Number of pages | 288 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |