A man walks out of a zoo, steals a canoe, and sets off to find
the tomb of a Greek hero he believes is his ancestor. This is not,
strictly speaking, a plan. It is, however, a novel.
Amado Tiberius Pelentin is twenty-five years old, convinced he is
the spiritual heir of the warrior Diomedes, and entirely untroubled
by the possibility that he might be wrong. Armed with a secondhand
book about forgotten heroes, a hand-drawn map of a small island off
Sardinia, and an inexhaustible supply of conviction, he sets out from
a nameless Romanian city on a journey that will take him down the
Danube, across the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus, and out into the
open Mediterranean - arriving, inevitably, somewhere he did not
intend.
Along the way he acquires Cato: a sardonic Danube smuggler who
pulls Amado from the reeds one night, intending to leave him on the
nearest shore, and who is still there, inexplicably, when the sea
deposits them both on the coast of Egypt. Between them lies the whole
of Europe by water - Greek islands where they are mistaken for
criminals, a Turkish fig-seller who believes himself descended from
sultans, a cold captain who names nothing he might have to mourn,
and a storm that does not arrive so much as replace the world.
The Wrong Shore is a picaresque novel in the tradition of
Cervantes and Laurence Sterne, filtered through the comic despair of
early Evelyn Waugh - a story about the indistinguishable distance
between destiny and delusion, and about the strange, ungovernable
loyalty of the man who follows you anyway.
For readers of Don Quixote, A Confederacy of Dunces,
and The Adventures of Augie March.
