the WRONG SHORE: Being First Volume of Adventures Amado Tiberius Pelentin

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.