Noah's Compass

Noah's Compass

Quintessential Tyler, yet full of surprises - a perfectly pitched, enchanting and affecting novel about a man adrift in his own life, Noah&#39;s Compass chimes gently, heartbreakingly with our times.<br /> <br /> With the humour and poignancy of her classic The Accidental Tourist (though with a protagonist who doesn&#39;t venture far from home) Anne Tyler&#39;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&#39;s just been &#39;let go&#39; 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.<br /> <br /> 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&#39;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.<br /> <br /> Noah&#39;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.