Fiction Pick of the Week: Noah's Compass

Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler 2009

Liam Pennywell explains to his grandson, who is colouring in his Bible story colouring book, that Noah has “nowhere to go. He was just trying to stay afloat. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn’t need a compass.” This “trying to stay afloat” is what Liam, age sixty-one is trying to do after he learns he has been unfairly downsized from his teaching job and then beaten unconscious by an intruder on the first night in his new apartment. He has no memory of the attack. The assault, and the resulting gap in his memory, is the impetus that sets him in motion at long last. In fact a lot of his life has gone by in a haze with no memories of what was happening to him or his family. He sets out on an examination of his past with the realization that he is still alive but had been living his whole life not really knowing where he was.
Anne Tyler, Pulitzer Prize winner, has written a sensitive, sympathetic and witty novel about a man learning to “stay afloat” without his compass.