A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom
A dazzling novel from the author of The Heart’s Invisible Furies
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3.9 • 18 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Some stories are universal. They play out across human history. And time is the river which will flow through them.
It starts with a family, a family which will mutate. For now, it is a father, mother and two sons. One with his father’s violence in his blood. One who lives his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will change their fate. It is a beginning.
Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years – they will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From distant Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium to a life amongst the stars in the third. While the world will change around them, their destinies will remain the same. It must play out as foretold. It is written.
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom is the extraordinary new novel from acclaimed writer John Boyne. Ambitious, far-reaching and mythic, it introduces a group of characters whose lives we will come to know and will follow through time and space until they reach their natural conclusion.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For a compelling story that spans two thousand years of rich human history, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom is an extraordinary journey well worth embarking upon. The story opens in Roman Palestine in 1AD, before the narrator and his family are reincarnated across distinct moments in time across the world. Though the narrative structure is challenging and opaque, it rewards persistence as the strands tie back in and project towards the future. Concluding his fantastical tale in 2080, Boyne executes a highly original, world-bending concept around a thesis that the themes of life will always remain universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boyne (A Ladder to The Sky) traces a quest for revenge across centuries in this inventive, engrossing novel. Spanning from Palestine in 1 CE to outer space in 2080, the narrative advances through each chapter with the characters renamed and living in a different location and time. The unnamed narrator disappoints his warrior father by becoming an artisan, fashioning sandals in fifth-century Guatemala and amulets in seventh-century Greenland. He loses his first wife on their wedding day to a natural disaster. His second marriage ends in his wife's death when his cousin spitefully exposes her location to her own vengeful family after the narrator refuses to keep the cousin's lover on as an apprentice. Full of rage, the narrator feigns muteness and enters a monastery, helping to illuminate the Book of Kells. As he plots revenge against his cousin, he begins sleeping with an ambitious female ruler (alternately Lady Macbeth, a Dutch queen, and a Chinese empress, all of whom keep him in their clutches). He commits a terrible act to escape the empress, which primes him for further tragedies. The conceit of shifting settings (with cameos from Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Ned Kelly, and other famous figures) is handled seamlessly, and the action never ceases. Fans of imaginative historical fiction and tragic epics will enjoy this quirky, lyrical novel.
