Dedalus: 154 books

The Decadent Traveller is a timely antidote to the nightmare world of backpacks, duty-frees and gastro-enteritis. It contains enough excitement and excess to last most armchair travellers their reading lifetime. 'For those unacquainted with Lucan and Gray's act, the pseudonymous pair write in character...

The Last of the Vostyachs won two literary prizes in Italy: The Premio Campiello and The Premio Stresa. As a child, Ivan and his father work as forced labourers in a mine in Siberia, the father having committed some minor offence against the regime. Ivan�s father is then murdered in front of his...

The clash between Christianity and paganism in a dark and hostile world is at the heart of Time of the Beast. In the Dark Ages, Athwold, a young monk, leaves his monastery in disgrace, to seek spiritual redemption by becoming a hermit in the wild expanse of the dismal Fenlands. Here he experiences love,...

Immortalised in Christopher Isherwood’s classic novel Mr Norris Changes Trains, Gerald Hamilton was the real-life model for the seedy but beguiling Mr Norris. Isherwood put him on the literary map but he was on other maps already, including those of police forces across Europe, and he was interned...

First published in 1876, Marthe was an important landmark in J.K. Huysmans's literary career: it was the 28-year old writer's first excursion into the novel form and propelled him into the growing ranks of the Naturalist movement, then beginning to take shape under Zola�s direction. Marthe was one...

'Georges Rodenbach, the Belgian Symbolist, died in 1898 but his writing is so modern it might have been written in this century. He eschews the heavy descriptions of most 19th century oeuvres for a lightness of touch that allows the reader to dance over the pages. Hans Cadzand�s Vocation is a novella...

The misfortunes of Jean Folantin, a downtrodden clerk working for the Ministry of the Interior in Paris, form the subject of J.-K. Huysmans’ blackly comic novella, Drifting (À vau-l’eau). At first glance, Folantin’s problems seem to be a world away from those of Jean Floressas des Esseintes,...

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....

One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identify him. When he regains consciousness he has lost...

'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,...