Dedalus Ebooks: 136 books

Passionate, calculating, only sometimes honourable but always honest, Fanny Legrand is one of the great female characters in literature. Nothing could be more shocking to Jean Gaussin, a serious young student from the provinces, than the moral swamp his mistress has been living in before they met....

'It has been a long while in Italian fiction since such an authentic and engaging voice has appeared.' Bruno Quaranta in La Stampa 'This memoir of four generations of a family provides a vivid and eloquent picture of Italian life stretching from the late 19th century, when the peasant lifestyle had...

At the heart of Codename Xenophon is the Greek nation: its history, culture and current predicament. We see a dysfunctional society through the eyes of George Zafiris, an Athens based private investigator. A thoughtful loner, he is forced to probe the heart of a failing society as he investigates...

This is a new translation by W. Glyn Jones of William Heinesen’s masterpiece and one of the most important Scandinavian novels of the 20th century. Music is at the heart of this book. The devotion to it of a group of amateur musicians forming the Boman Quartet prevents a series of dramatic events from...

The anonymous narrator of Ink in the Blood has long been fascinated by tattoos, by the symbols and emblems people choose, and by the physical aspect, even pain, of a needle injecting ink under the skin. As an artist who makes his living by drawing illustrations, he starts making designs for Dimitri,...

Of the volumes available to the English public, The Green Face, first published in 1916, is the most enjoyable. In an Amsterdam that very much resembles the Prague of The Golem, a stranger, Hauberisser, enters by chance a magician's shop. The name on the shop, he believes, is Chidher Green; inside,...

The Road to Darkness contains two decadent and highly controversial novels; Daniel Jesus (first published in 1905) and Severin (first published in 1914) and the short story The ghost of the Jewish Ghetto (first published in 1914). "A series of disgusting orgies with some mystical drivel wrapped round...

Pfitz is a surprisingly warm and likeable book, a combination of intellectual high-wire act and good traditional storytelling with a population of lovers and madmen we do care about, despite their advertised fictionality. Certainly Crumey�s narrative gymnastics have not affected his ability to create...

'A veritable successor to Douglas Adams,John Lucas has demonstrated with his debut novel a capacity to fuse witty satire and the more inventive elements of science fiction. If you liked Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy you will definitely like this imaginative and humorous view of the place our planet...

'The ghoulish misdeeds and conflicted psychology of the undead are memorably explored in this classic supernatural thriller, published in England in 1983 and previously unavailable in the US.

In the terse, atmospheric opening pages, an unnamed narrator finds a partially charred manuscript...

Charles Nodier was one of the first populariser of the literary vampire story: Smarra, or the Demons of the Night(1821) is the most notable and horrific of his stories. Nodier also carried forward the French tradition of literary fairy tales, which he enriched with the fantastic extravagance of the...

New Jerusalem Monastery, seventeenth-century Moscow. Patriarch Nikon has instructed an itinerant French dramatist to stage the New Testament and hasten the Second Coming. But this will be a strange form of theatre. The actors are untrained, illiterate Russian peasants, and nobody is allowed to play...

Forget Grisham, Mortimer and the rest. Bring on Paul Genney, the former dentist and potato merchant, turned barrister, whose second novel Sentence Adjourned is now out. Henry Wallace, a barrister, flits between Old Bailey terrorist trials and lucrative civil actions with an ease that would terrify the...

The Tower at the Edge of the World is William Heinesen's last novel written when he was 76, and is the summation of all of his work. He is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Nordic author of the twentieth century. William Heinesen describes The Tower at the Edge of the World as a poetic mosaic...