# Noah's Compass

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/anne-tyler/noahs-compass/9781473512672

![Noah's Compass](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage-digital/anne-tyler/noahs-compass_978-14-7351-267-2-09b17dba.webp?v=2026-10-03%2002%3A43%3A58)

- Book: [Noah's Compass](https://www.bookquiver.com/anne-tyler/noahs-compass) ([Noah's Compass.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/anne-tyler/noahs-compass.md))
- Authors: [Annie Tucker](https://www.bookquiver.com/anne-tyler)
- Publisher: vintage_digital
- Medium: audio
- Length: 9 h 4 min
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- ISBN: 978-14-7351-267-2
- Published: 2014-07-03
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Audiobook · 9 h 4 min

## Description

Quintessential Tyler, yet full of surprises - a perfectly pitched, enchanting and affecting novel about a man adrift in his own life, Noah's Compass chimes gently, heartbreakingly with our times. With the humour and poignancy of her classic The Accidental Tourist (though with a protagonist who doesn't venture far from home) Anne Tyler's new novel tells the story of a year in the life of Liam Pennywell, a man in his sixty-first year. A classical pedant, he's just been 'let go' from his schoolteaching job and downsizes to a tiny out-of-town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on his first night. Widowed, re-married, divorced and the father of three daughters, Liam is a man who is proud of his recall but has learned to dodge issues and skirt adventure. An unpleasant event occurs, though, to jolt him out of his certainty. Obsessed with a frightening gap in his memory, he sets out to uncover what happened, and finds instead an unusual woman with secrets of her own, and a late-flowering love that brings its own thorny problems. His ex-wife (sensible Barbara) and daughters worry about him but Liam blunders on, His teenage daughter Kitty is sent to stay - though it's not clear who is minding whom. His middle daughter, Louise, is a born-again Christian with a son called Jonah, but her certainties leave Liam still more perplexed. Noah's Compass is about memory and its loss, about incidents and relationships which open up sight lines into a painful past long dead for a man who becomes aware that merely trying to stay afloat may not be enough.