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Pilgermann

Penguin Modern Classics

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

It is 1097 and a traveller arrives in the great, walled city of Antioch with a vision of a beautiful and mysterious geometric design that will change the lives of all those who see it. Pilgermann is a mesmerising recreation of the world of the Crusades, following its unlikely hero and those he meets on a journey of picaresque horror across a Europe of hatreds, visions and a desperate wish for salvation.

'Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple' Guardian

'A dark treatise on the mysterious nature of things ... The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch, pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel' The New York Times Book Review

'A strange and beautiful work' Evening Standard

© Russell Hoban 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Medieval Metaphysical & Visionary Middle Ages

Critic reviews

Superb ... Pilgermann is history, metaphysics, a tangle of mysteries, profound and simple.
The world according to Pilgermann is a brutish place borrowing from Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque depictions of hell and the literary traditions of pilgrimage narrative, allegory and the historical novel. It is a novel of ideas... sophisticated and demanding.
A strange and beautiful work, whose mysteries are worth contemplation. Hoban's prose is constantly persuasive. Pilgermann is that rare thing - a novel that can be read with profit more than once.
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