Books by Mathias Enard

In 1506, Michelangelo - a young but already renowned sculptor - is invited by the sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design was rejected: 'You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal.' Michelangelo, after some hesitation, flees Rome and an irritated Pope Julius II - whose commission he leaves unfinished - and arrives in Constantinople for this truly epic project. Once there, he explores the beauty and wonder of the Ottoman Empire, sketching and describing his impressions along the way, and becomes immersed in cloak-and-dagger palace intrigues as he struggles to create what could be his greatest architectural masterwork. Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants - constructed from real historical fragments - is a thrilling page-turner about why stories are told, why bridges are built, and how seemingly unmatched pieces, seen from the opposite sides of civilization, can mirror one another.

Vinder af den franske Prix Goncourt, den italienske Premio Von Rezzori og den tyske Leipzig Prize samt shortlistet til Den internationale Man Booker Pris 2017. Den franske forfatter Mathias Enards gennembrudsroman. Mens natten falder på over Wien, ligger musikologen Franz Ritter søvnløs i sin seng og glider ind og ud af drømme og minder. Han har fået dårlige nyheder fra sin læge og genbesøger nu de vigtigste kapitler i sit liv: den vedvarende fascination af Mellemøsten, de mange rejser til Istanbul, Aleppo, Damaskus og Teheran og mødet med kunstnere, akademikere og orientalister. I centrum står den store kærlighed til Sarah, en rasende intelligent fransk akademiker fanget i de intrikate spændinger mellem Europa og Mellemøsten. Mathias Énard skriver lyrisk, intellektuelt og berusende om mødet mellem øst og vest. ”En fantastisk, flygtig og excentrisk kærlighedserklæring til Mellemøstlig kunst og kultur” - Los Angeles Review of Books

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017. As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, takes to his sickbed with an unspecified illness and spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories, revisiting the important chapters of his life: his ongoing fascination with the Middle East and his numerous travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tehran, as well as the various writers, artists, musicians, academics, Orientalists, and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape. At the centre of these memories is his elusive, unrequited love, Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the intricate tension between Europe and the Middle East. An immersive, nocturnal, musical novel, full of generous erudition and bittersweet humour, COMPASS is a journey and a declaration of admiration, a quest for the otherness inside us all and a hand reaching out - like a bridge between West and East, yesterday and tomorrow. Winner of the 2015 Prix Goncourt, this is Mathias Enard's most ambitious novel since ZONE.

Francis Mirkovic, a French Intelligence Services agent for fifteen years, is travelling first class on the train from Milan to Rome. Handcuffed to the luggage rack above him is a briefcase containing a wealth of information about the war criminals, terrorists and arms dealers of the Zone - the Mediterranean region, from Barcelona to Beirut, from Algiers to Trieste, which has become his speciality - to sell to the Vatican. Exhausted by alcohol and amphetamines, he revisits the violent history of the Zone and his own participation in that violence, beginning as a mercenary fighting for a far-right Croatian militia in the 1990s. One of the truly original books of the decade, and written as a single, hypnotic, propulsive, physically irresistible sentence, Mathias Enard's Zone is an Iliad for our time, an extraordinary and panoramic view of violent conflict and its consequences in the twentieth century and beyond.