Pilgermann

Penguin Modern Classics

By: Russell Hoban

Narrated by: George Weightman

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

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.

At times horrifying, always poetic, often sublime

One of the profoundest and most haunting novels I’ve read. It presents a Job-like wrestling with suffering and God and the meaning of living in and journeying through an impossible age; at times horrifying, always poetic, often sublime. The performance of the actor on this audio production is superb.