Dedalus: 154 books

A baroque extravaganza from the author of Memoirs of a Gnostic Dwarf which will delight his readers. The young hero awakes to find himself on a train with Dr Freud from Vienna and the sadistic train attendant Malkowitz. He can't remember who he is nor where he is going and has certainly no idea why he...

The False Ambassador is a circular journey through a world just emerging from the Middle Ages, forced by war and discovery into new ways of living and thinking. ''Beginning in 1428, this swashbuckling romp recreates a brutal medieval world on the cusp of civilisation. Despite his scholarly inclination,...

The strikingly inventive structure of this novel allows the author to explore the similarities between fictions and history. At any point, there are infinite possibilities for the way the story, a life, or the history of the world might progress. The whole work is enjoyably unpredictable, and poses profound...

Pascal, a landowner fallen on hard times and trapped in a miserable marriage, runs away from home and wins a lot of money at the gaming tables in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile a body has been found in the millrace of his village and it is assumed that Pascal has killed himself. Seizing what looks like a...

I Malavoglia is one of the great landmarks of Italian Literature. It is so rich in character, emotion and texture that it lives forever in the imagination of all who read it. What Verga called in his preface a 'sincere and dispassionate study of society' is an epic struggle against poverty and the elements...

'Lawrence's translations of Verga's Sicilian short stories are classics in their genre, perfectly capturing their cunning fusion of artlessness, austere detachment and skilfully engineered spontaneity as well as retaining something of that lofty style for which Verga's Italian contemporaries so admired...

This volume contains the long novella Sparrow and five stories never previously translated into English: Temptation, The Schoolmaster, The Devil's Hand, The Gold Key and Comrades. A great read for anyone interested in Sicily and Southern Italy. Verga is the master of the short-story form. 'Giovanni Verga...

It's the story of a Sicilian peasant who rises to the aristocracy, ruffling feathers at all social levels, and it's a masterpiece of 19th century realism. Scotland on Sunday D.H. Lawrence's translation brings to life the Sicily of the 19th century. It will appeal to readers of classic fiction or anyone...

Manon Lescaut is a classic of French Literature, has never been out of print in France since its publication in 1731 and has inspired several operatic versions and at least three films. Set in Regency Paris and Louisiana around 1720, it has a significance which transcends its context. It is a love story,...

One of the great novels about obsessive love, The Woman and The Puppet was first published in France in 1898 and is considered Louys' masterpiece. It has inspired five film versions, including von Steinberg's in 1935 and Bunuel's in 1977. 'This elegantly simple story has lost none of its charm. It is...

What Became of the White Savage enjoyed phenomenal success in France where it won nine literary prizes including the prestigious Goncourt Prize in the first novel category. Some time in the 1840s, Narcisse, a young French sailor is abandoned on the coast of Australia and given up for dead by his shipmates....

a haunting classic Madeleine Kingsley in She Magazine �An intricate, finely crafted and polished tale, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague brings magic-realism to the dimly lit streets of Prague. Through the squares and alleys a woman walks, the embodiment of human pity, sorrow, death. Everyone...

'Jacobsen has made a more profound impression on me emotionally than anything else I’ve read in recent years.' Sigmund Freud ‘In Jacobsen we have the earliest and noblest example of an author who combines a powerful imagination and a wistfully tender nature with all the finesse of the most highly...

Crushed by poverty or the weight of their pretensions, the high and low life of 19th century Madrid provides the cast for this enjoyably bleak portrait of a family's decline, fall and recovery. The widow Dona Francisca, reduced from salon to slum, is protected by her servant Benita, who begs and barters...