Pilgermann

Description

A historical fantasy offers a wry commentary on religious belief It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

On his death in 2011, The Times described Russell Hoban as 'perhaps the most consistently strange writer of the late 20th century'. He thought and wrote in an extraordinary range of genres, becoming first a bestselling writer of children's books, particularly the immortal Frances stories and his first novel, The Mouse and His Child (1968). After its publication he continued to write for children (most notably perhaps the Captain Najork books with Quentin Blake and The Marzipan Pig), but focussed most of his energies on a sequence of wonderful novels, which began with The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973) and ended with Angelica Lost and Found (2010). He also wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's opera The Second Mrs Kong (1994). His novels were wildly various, but share his obsession with objects, animals, specific works of art and pieces of music, his love of words and sense of humour. Penguin Modern Classics publishes his first eight novels- The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz, Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker, Pilgermann, The Medusa Frequency, Fremder and Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer.

Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple. * The Guardian * The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque depictions of hell and the literary traditions of pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel. It is a novel of ideas... sophisticated and demanding. * New York Times Book Review * A strange and beautiful work, whose mysteries are worth contemplation. Hoban's prose is constantly persuasive. Pilgermann is that rare thing - a novel that can be read with profit more than once. * Evening Standard *