<p>‘Crisply translated by Charlotte Mandell (as was <em>Zone</em>), <em>Compass</em> is Proustian in its set-up. There are passages of pure delight with rare insight into the human condition.’<br />
— Tobias Grey, <em>Financial Times</em></p>

<p>‘The French novelist Mathias Enard is an unusual kind of regionalist. His great subject isn’t a small town or neighborhood but the vast Mediterranean basin, and practically everyone within it. Enard speaks Persian and Arabic, and he has taught at universities throughout Europe and the Middle East. He sees the Mediterranean as a distinct literary and historical region, a “zone,” as he called it in his novel of the same title. In nine books, three of which have been translated into English, he has charted a course through this zone, writing about sectarian violence in the Balkans; the varying tugs of jihadism, tradition, and globalization in Morocco; and a rogue’s gallery of thieves, killers, and eccentrics. Enard’s prose, which tends to pile descriptive clauses ever higher on top of one another (<em>Zone</em> is a single, five-hundred-page sentence), can be mesmerizing. But it’s the larger project of his writing that bears particular consideration: in his fiction, Enard is constructing an intricate, history-rich vision of a persistently misunderstood part of the world.’<br />
— Jacob Silverman, <em>New Yorker</em></p>

<p>‘Enard is like the anti-Houellebecq, and he deserves far more attention.’ <br />
— Sam Sacks, <em>Wall Street Journal</em> </p>

<p>‘The beauty of <em>Compass</em> is the sheer breadth and density of its vision, calling forth a multitude of different worlds, bound only by the capacious mind of its narrator, an aging Austrian musicologist named Franz Ritter.’ <br />
— Jeffrey Zuckerman, <em>New Republic</em></p>

<p>‘A love letter to the cosmopolitan Middle East ... [a] strangely powerful work.’ <br />
— Steven Poole, <em>Guardian</em></p>