Quintessential Tyler, yet full of surprises - a perfectly pitched, enchanting and affecting novel about a man adrift in his own life, "Noah's Compass" chimes gently, heartbreakingly with our times. 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 new novel tells the story of a year in the life of Liam Pennywell, a man in his sixty-first year. A classical pedant, he's just been 'let go' from his schoolteaching job and downsizes to a tiny out-of-town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on his first night. 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. An unpleasant event occurs, though, to jolt him out of his certainty. Obsessed with a frightening gap in his memory, he sets out to uncover what happened, and finds instead an unusual woman with secrets of her own, and a late-flowering love that brings its own thorny problems.
His ex-wife (sensible Barbara) and daughters worry about him but Liam blunders on, His teenage daughter Kitty is sent to stay - though it's not clear who is minding whom. His middle daughter, Louise, is a born-again Christian with a son called Jonah, but her certainties leave Liam still more perplexed. "Noah's Compass" is about memory and its loss, about incidents and relationships which open up sight lines into a painful past long dead for a man who becomes aware that merely trying to stay afloat may not be enough.
- ISBN10 1444802011
- ISBN13 9781444802016
- Publish Date 1 July 2010 (first published 6 August 2009)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 31 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher F A Thorpe (Publishers)
- Imprint Ulverscroft Ltd
- Edition Large type / large print edition
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 304
- Language English