Septimania - Hardcover

Septimania is a masterpiece: a rule-bending, category-smashing, delightful work of brilliance that combines history and longing and religion and timelessness with good old-fashioned story-telling -- Bill Buford, author of Heat and Among the Thugs A voracious novel, boundless in its curiosity and fearless in its execution... a storytelling feat -- Juan Gabriel Vasquez A spirited and lambent invention, rendered in precise and often lyrically beautiful prose -- Owen Sheers, author of I Saw A Man and Resistance Unique-a whimsical tale told without whimsy and a fantasy delineated by the fiercest intellectual control * Daily Mail * There is a hint of Harry Potter about the start of Jonathan Levi's immensely ambitious Septimania... the format of a novel, but it has roots in the folk-tales of The Arabian Nights. It reaches out to epic, in the form of Dante's Divine Comedy, and to Wordsworth's Newton, voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone... a love story, too. More than one reading will be needed to digest Mr. Levi's comprehensive, many-branching vision. It adds new dimensions to the idea of the novel * The Wall Street Journal * Stupendous -- Alvaro Enrigue * The New York Times Book Review * An energetically brilliant, genre-defying masterpiece filled with lavish descriptions, mysteries intertwined with history and legend, and a large cast of memorable, offbeat characters. Be prepared to stay up late savoring every word. Although it's a literary dream of a book, it's also a storyteller's work of magic, and a fantastically suspenseful adventure, along the lines of Arturo Perez Reverte's The Flanders Panel and Iain Pear's The Dream of Scipio, told with the aplomb and smart humor of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Franzen. * Booklist, Starred Review * Laced with philosophy and wit. A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored * Kirkus * Highly intelligent, insanely ambitious, and restlessly imaginative, Levi's novel is also so recondite that any attempt to accurately describe its plot risks sounding like madness... Levi's vast creation pays off once you give in to its unique fusion of history, music, and the origin of belief in invisible things * Publishers Weekly * Septimania is saturated with extraordinary characters, incidents, and narratives. Jonathan Levi, his sails boosted by enviable erudition, navigates his metaphysical sea with commendable dexterity, offering the reader a sample of the boundless joys of literature * Jewish Chronicle Online * Septimania is a love story, a kingdom, a novel of wild and rich imagination -- A.B. Yehoshua, author of A Woman in Jerusalem The musical prose combined with profound, complex ideas is masterful -- Jennifer Clement, author of Prayers for the Stolen and The Widow Basquiat A richly imagined, complex tapestry of gleaming threads woven through the centuries. This is realism as magical as the best of Garcia Marquez -- Homerjo Aridjis, author of 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile

On an idyllic spring afternoon in 1978 in the loft of a church outside Cambridge, England, an organ tuner named Malory loses his virginity to a dyslexic math genius named Louiza. When Louiza disappears, Malory follows her trail to Rome. There, the quest to find his love gets sidetracked when he discovers he is the heir to the Kingdom of Septimania, given by Charlemagne to the Jews of 8th-century France. In the midst of a Rome reeling from the kidnappings and bombs of the Red Brigades, Malory is crowned King of the Jews, Holy Roman Emperor and possibly Caliph of All Islam. Over the next fifty years, Malory's search for Louiza leads to encounters with Aldo Moro, Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Romanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, an elephant that changes colour, a shadowy U.S. spy agency and one of the 9/11 bombers, an appleseed from the original Tree of Knowledge, and the secret history of Isaac Newton and his discovery of a Grand Unified Theory that explains everything. But most of all, Septimania is the quest of a Candide for love and knowledge, and the ultimate discovery that they may be unified after all.