Septimania - Hardcover

Levi's fable of love, religion and physics dances with a spirited and lambent invention, rendered in precise and often lyrically beautiful prose.--Owen Sheers, author of I Saw a Man and Resistance

For people who love to dream.

Intellectually fascinating and emotionally powerful, the tale that follows is a poignant meditation on youth, love, myth, history, and quantum theory.

An ambitious and imaginative epic.

An exhilarating epic that crisscrosses the borders of the world and of the imagination.

[L]aced with philosophy and wit. A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.

Levi is using a lot of ingredients here, and the result is a playful, rich dish created by a master chef. Levi's idealistic novel is as challenging as it is refreshing. Boldly putting his fable forward, he is more honest than many of today's fiction writers

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.

Stupendous.--Álvaro Enrigue, The New York Times Book Review, "By the Book"

A richly imagined, complex tapestry of gleaming threads woven through the centuries to converge in a glorious epiphany. This is realism as magical as the best of García Márquez.--Homerjo Aridjis, author of 1492: The Life and Times of Juan Cabezon of Castile

On an 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 eighth-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 Pope John Paul II, a band of lost Romanians, a magical Bernini statue, Haroun al Rashid of Arabian Nights fame, an elephant that changes color, 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. It is the quest of a Candide for love and knowledge, and the ultimate discovery that they may be unified after all.