Septimania - Softcover

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

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

For people who love to dream.

An ambitious and imaginative epic.

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

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.

Stylish, globetrotting . . . [A] gripping love story.

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

Septimania is a voracious novel, boundless in its curiosity and fearless in its execution. It is a storytelling feat.--Juan Gabriel Vásquez, author of The Sound of Things Falling

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.