Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, an astounding novel that bridges Europe and the Islamic world
Winner of the Prix Goncourt (France), the Leipzig Prize (Germany), Premio Von Rezzori (Italy), shortlisted for the 2017 International Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
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 center 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.
With exhilarating prose and sweeping erudition, Mathias Énard pulls astonishing elements from disparate sources―nineteenth-century composers and esoteric orientalists, Balzac and Agatha Christie―and binds them together in a most magical way.

Compass

Literature & Fiction

Énard, Mathias

Literary

New Directions

Financial Times Book of the Year
An adventure of Michelangelo in Constantinople from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass
In 1506, Michelangelo―a young but already renowned sculptor―is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design had been rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.”
Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II―whose commission he leaves unfinished―and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants―constructed from real historical fragments―is a story about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Michelangelo’s adventure in Constantinople, from the “mesmerizing” (New Yorker) and “masterful” (Washington Post) author of Compass
In 1506, Michelangelo―a young but already renowned sculptor―is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, along with an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci’s design was rejected: “You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.” Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II―whose commission he leaves unfinished―and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants―constructed from real historical fragments―is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched fragments, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

To research his thesis on contemporary agrarian life, anthropology student David Mazon moves from Paris to La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a village in the marshlands of western France. Determined to understand the essence of the local culture, the intrepid young scholar scurries around restlessly on his moped to interview residents. But what David doesn't yet know is that here, in this seemingly ordinary place, once the stage for wars and revolutions, Death leads a dance: when one thing perishes, the Wheel of Life recycles its soul and hurls it back into the world as microbe, human, or wild animal, sometimes in the past, sometimes in the future. And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language. Brimming with Mathias Ã%nard's characteristic wit and encyclopedic brilliance, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild is a riotous novel where the edges between past and present are constantly dissolving against a Rabelaisian backdrop of excess. Â&nbsp;

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

Genre Fiction

The Deserters

Francis Mirkovic, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone  -  the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality  -  to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard's Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.

Zone

Fitzcarraldo Editions

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

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. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard's most ambitious novel since ZONE.

In 1506, Michelangelo - a young but already renowned sculptor - is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design was rejected: 'You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.' Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II - whose commission he leaves unfinished - and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS AND ELEPHANTS - constructed from real historical fragments - is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Tell Them Of Battles Kings & Elephants

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Énard, Mathias. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Énard, Mathias

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Énard, Mathias. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Compass

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

Compass

Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers' Guild

The Deserters

Zone

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

Compass

Tell Them Of Battles Kings & Elephants