Winner of the 2020 , France's best foreign book of the year.Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger

Sebastian Barry‘Astounding’

Ayad Akhtar‘A masterpiece’

Jonathan Lethem‘This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise’

In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.

Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself.Three Rings

Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, , in Istanbul.Mimesis

Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the , – a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years – resulted in his banishment.OdysseyThe Adventures of Telemachus

W. G. SebaldAnd the German novelist , self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.

Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As s moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.OdysseyThree Ring