We get to share in his personal discoveries through the humour and good fellowship of the road, full of entertaining misadventures. But there is never any doubt that there is an ultimate purpose to these journeys: a passionate need to bear witness to the truth about the past, after centuries of persecution by an alien ruling class. So through the dense clouds of historical tragedy, Wright exchavates hope that a revival of pride and dignity in Andean culture is possible.

Mathematics student G is trying to resurrect his studies, which is proving difficult as he finds himself - and not for the first time - drawn into investigating a series of mysterious crimes. When Kristen, a researcher hired by the Lewis Carroll Brotherhood, makes a startling new discovery concerning pages torn from Caroll's diary, she hesitates to reveal to her employers a hitherto unknown chapter in his life. Oxford would be rocked to its core if the truth about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell - the real Alice - were brought to light. After Kristen is involved in a surreal accident and members of the Brotherhood are anonymously sent salacious photographs of Alice, G joins forces with Kristen as they begin to realise that dark powers are at work. More pictures are received, and it becomes clear that a murderer is stalking anyone who shows too much interest in Carroll's life. G must stretch his mathematical mind to its limits to solve the mystery and understand the cryptic workings of the Brotherhood. Until then, nobody, not even G, is safe. A thrilling novel from the author of The Oxford Murders, inspired by true, strange stories from Caroll's life, The Oxford Brotherhood is sure to make you curiouser and curiouser.

Milan, 1497: Leonardo da Vinci is completing his masterpiece, "The Last Supper."Pope Alexander VI is determined to execute him after realizing that the painting contains clues to a baffling -- and blasphemous -- message, which he is determined to decode. The Holy Grail and the Eucharistic Bread are missing, there is no meat on the table and, shockingly, the apostles are portraits of well-known heretics -- none of them depicted with halos. And why has the artist painted himself into the scene with his back turned toward Jesus? The clues to Leonardo's greatest puzzle are right before your eyes....

A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries. In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000-volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading. In this poignant and personal reevaluation of his life as a reader, the author illuminates the highly personal art of reading and affirms the vital role of public libraries. Manguel's musings range widely, from delightful reflections on the idiosyncrasies of book lovers to deeper analyses of historic and catastrophic book events, including the burning of ancient Alexandria's library and contemporary library lootings at the hands of ISIS. With insight and passion, the author underscores the universal centrality of books and their unique importance to a democratic, civilized, and engaged society.

An original look at how literary characters can transcend their books to guide our lives, by one of the world's most eminent bibliophiles

Charmingly written in his signature engaging erudite style, Alberto Manguel examines how literary characters can have changing identities, and can suddenly shift from behind their conventional stories to teach us about the complexities of love, loss, and life.

In this personal reckoning with his favorite characters, including Jim from Huckleberry Finn, Phoebe from The Catcher in the Rye, Job and Jonah from the Bible, Quasimodo, the Hippogriff, Little Red Riding Hood, Captain Nemo, Hamlet's mother, and Dr. Frankenstein's Monster, the author shares his unique powers as a reader, encouraging us to establish our own unique literary relationships. An intimate introduction and Manguel's own "doodles" complete this delightfully magical book.

A leading European intellectual reflects on the changing concept of melancholy throughout history Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer Laszlo Foeldenyi as "one of the most brilliant essayists of our time." Foeldenyi's extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy's ambiguities. Along the way Foeldenyi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Foeldenyi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, and modern times. He finds the meaning of melancholy has always been ambiguous, even paradoxical. In our own times it may be regarded either as a psychic illness or a mood familiar to everyone. The author analyzes the complexities of melancholy and concludes that its dual nature reflects the inherent tension of birth and mortality. To understand the melancholic disposition is to find entry to some of the deepest questions one's life. This distinguished translation brings Foeldenyi's work directly to English-language readers for the first time.

For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known.
        The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood.
The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."

Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.

A celebration of reading, of libraries, and of the mysterious human desire to give order to the universe Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. "Libraries," he says, "have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries. Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the "complete" libraries of the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria as well as the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought-the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral "memory libraries" kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, the library of books never written-Manguel illuminates the mysteries of libraries as no other writer could. With scores of wonderful images throughout, The Library at Night is a fascinating voyage through Manguel's mind, memory, and vast knowledge of books and civilizations.

An intimate and exhilarating journey through the world of books by the internationally celebrated author In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading," argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything," writes Manguel, "landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create." Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those "numinous memory palaces we call libraries" also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us "a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink," to grant us room and board in our passage.

A morose provincial inspector of roads in Aragon settles down to write the fable of the Snow Queen. The Netherlands has now been stretched into a vast country with Northern flatlands and hazardous Alpine ranges in the south. Kai and Lucia are circus illusionists, and when Kai is kidnapped, Lucia must rescue him from the Snow Queen's palace. In the Dutch Mountains is an elegantly constructed story within a story, laced with the wit that characterises the work of this outstanding European writer.

An exploration of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, author of The Guide of the Perplexed, from one of the world’s foremost bibliophiles   Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.   As a scholar of Jewish law, a physician, and a philosopher, Maimonides was a singular figure. His work in extracting all the commanding precepts of Jewish law from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, interpreting and commenting on them, and translating them into terms that would allow students to lead sound Jewish lives became the model for translating God’s word into a language comprehensible by all. His work in medicine—which brought him such fame that he became Saladin’s personal physician—was driven almost entirely by reason and observation.   In this biography, Alberto Manguel examines the question of Maimonides’ universal appeal—he was celebrated by Jews, Arabs, and Christians alike. In our time, when the need for rationality and recognition of the truth is more vital than ever, Maimonides can help us find strategies to survive with dignity in an uncertain world.

While travelling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading seemed to reflect the world he was living in. An article in the daily paper would be suddenly illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a single word. He decided to keep a record of these moments, rereading a book a month, and formed A Reading Diary: a volume of notes, impressions of travel, of friends, of public and private events, all elicited by his reading.

Rich with literary awards and honours, Alberto Manguel extends his literary genius to address and complete a thoughtfully crafted extrapolation on a paper left unfinished by Northrop Frye in 1943. The result is a succinct yet densely multilayered examination of how various readings of Homer throughout the annals of history cast light upon the human tendency towards war rather than peace and asks what roles writing and reading play to bring the world into better equilibrium. Central to this lecture is the concept of re-binding, a word drawn from the Latin roots for the word religion, which Manguel posits is the essential definition of poetry. Homer's writings, the point of origin of all written verse, are also the first written instance of the binding of imagined, written, and read realities. The semantics of Homer's name and the literal and figurative ramifications of his blindness are investigated as Manguel builds the scaffold for unveiling our own blindness through our desire to read Homer in our own image. We are left to examine our own assumptions. Comble de prix litteraires et d'honneurs, Alberto Manguel prete son genie litteraire a l'etude et au parachevement d'une extrapolation songee que Northrop Frye avait laissee en plan en 1943. Il en resulte une analyse succincte mais en replis serres des multiples lectures d'Homere leguees par les siecles, qui revele comment ces interpretations eclairent la propension humaine a la guerre plutot qu'a la paix, ce qui le mene a s'interroger sur le role que jouent l'ecriture et la lecture quand il s'agit de creer un monde plus equilibre. La notion de re-lier, un mot dont les racines latines sont les memes que le mot religion, est au coeur de cette conference, et Manguel en fait la definition essentielle de la poesie. Les ecrits d'Homere, point d'origine de toute la poesie ecrite, fournissent aussi la premiere occurrence d'un lien entre les realites imaginees, ecrites et lues. La valeur semantique du nom d'Homere et les repercussions concretes et figurees de sa cecite font partie des elements que Manguel scrute pour fonder son evocation de notre aveuglement a nous quand nous insistons pour lire Homere a notre propre image. Nous n'avons plus qu'a remettre nos hypotheses.

An eclectic history of human curiosity, a great feast of ideas, and a memoir of a reading life from an internationally celebrated reader and thinker Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question "Why?" has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history. Why does evil exist? What is beauty? How does language inform us? What defines our identity? What is our responsibility to the world? In Alberto Manguel's most personal book to date, the author tracks his own life of curiosity through the reading that has mapped his way. Manguel chooses as his guides a selection of writers who sparked his imagination. He dedicates each chapter to a single thinker, scientist, artist, or other figure who demonstrated in a fresh way how to ask "Why?" Leading us through a full gallery of inquisitives, among them Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson, Socrates, and, most importantly, Dante, Manguel affirms how deeply connected our curiosity is to the readings that most astonish us, and how essential to the soaring of our own imaginations.

In the lush, uninhibited atmosphere of Samoa, Robert Louis Stevenson is languishing with the disease that will soon kill him; when a chance encounter with the mysterious Scottish missionary, Mr Baker, turns his thoughts back to his conservative, post-Reformation Edinburgh home. As Stevenson's meetings with the tantalizingly nebulous missionary become increasingly strange, a series of crimes against the native population sours the atmosphere. With its playful nod to Stevenson's life and work Manguel has woven an intoxicating tale in which fantasy infiltrates reality.

"To read is to fly; it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience, and the fruits of many inquiries. A life thus equipped might not be happier – might sometimes be less so, indeed, for to know more can be to feel more, and the ground note of history is a long cry of pain – but it is vastly richer . . .As is inevitable with so self-reflexive an enterprise, much has been written about books and reading. Little of it has been better than this wonderful account, 'A History of Reading', by Alberto Manguel, a judicious magpie of a literatus who has collected a trove of fascinations on the subject, and arranged them brilliantly . . . .almost every page bristles with interest"
A C GRAYLING 'Financial Times'

"Wonderful stuff . . . A rich and savoury casserole of learning, Manguel’s 'A History of Reading' at first refreshes and soothes the jaded palate and ends with delicious titbits from the lives and works of great authors. "
VICTORIA NEUMARK ' Times Educational Supplement'

"What Alberto Manguel has given us is his personal response to books and reading in the form of an anthology comprising mythology, anecdote, theology, history and autobiography . . . in lucid and elegant prose . . . highly enjoyable. I finished 'A History of Reading' with a sense of gratitude to have shared this journey through time in the company of a mind so lively, knowledgeable and sympathetic. "
P D JAMES'Sunday Times'

"A charming, old-fashioned, up-to-date, belletristic tribute to the art of reading."
KARL MILLER 'Observer'

"Delightful, written in a lively and lucid prose. "
ROGER SCRUTON 'The Times'

"A passionate book . . . .highly entertaining. "
MICHIKO KAKUTANI 'New York Times'

Manguel’s erudition is awe-inspiring"
D J ENRIGHT 'Times Literary Supplement'

"A delightfully wide-ranging, beguiling study of a small daily miracle. "
PAUL BAILEY ' Daily Telegraph'

Imbued with a magical quality, this elegant fable transports readers to early 20th-century China, a country brimming with ghosts, with weddings between the living and the dead, and with superstitions and ancestral rites. Living in the midst of this is the tale's protagonist, a young girl living in dread of the marriage her parents are attempting to arrange for her. She has eyes only for Xiaomei, the daughter of a blind bird vendor. She and Xiaomei initiate an at-first halting, timid friendship, but in their meetings in the park where the elderly gather with their birds, they discover the importance of what should be spoken and what should be left unsaid, and of beauty and loyalty, which have the power to lift them out of their circumstances.

An epic masterpiece of world literature, in a magnificent new translation by one if the most acclaimed translators of our time. A towering figure of the Renaissance, Luis de Gongora pioneered poetic forms so radically different from the dominant aesthetic of his time that he was derided as "the Prince of Darkness." The Solitudes, his magnum opus, is an intoxicatingly lush novel-in-verse that follows the wanderings of a shipwrecked man who has been spurned by his lover. Wrenched from civilization and its attendant madness, the desolate hero is transported into a natural world that is at once menacing and sublime. In this stunning edition Edith Grossman captures the breathtaking beauty of a work that represents one of the high points of poetic achievement in any language. Luis de Gongora (1561-1627) is among the most prominent figures of the Spanish Golden Age. Edith Grossman is the acclaimed translator of Don Quixote, as well as books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes. She is the recipient of the inaugural Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Translation Prize, the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, and a Guggenheim fellowship. Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of dozens of books, including A History of Reading and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

From ancient Greece to the close of the second millennium, the keen scientific eye has been translated over and over into graceful and meaningful texts in which not only the world observed but the act of observation itself is set down for the common reader. By the Light of the Glow-Worm Lamp represents the best of the nature-writing genre in over three dozen works from the past three centuries.

Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the Argentinian writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on the pavement underneath his balcony in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew him - which include those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself - are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary man masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor - these are but a few facets of a mysterious figure in this tribute to falsehood. Between the lines, the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shape-shifting creations, which give infinite expressions to the objects of our desires.

Ossyane, a young Lebanese of both aristocratic Ottoman and humble Armenian origins, goes to Montpellier to study away from the burden of his liberal father’s revolutionary ambitions. World War II breaks out and Ossyane is drawn into the Resistance where he meets Clara who is Jewish. He returns to Beirut and, despite the obstacles, to a happy marriage with Clara. The Jewish-Muslim couple move to Haifa but, if one war has made a hero out of Ossyane, another, much closer to home, is destined to split him from his wife and separate him from the world and the people that he loves. In this delicate and compassionate novel Amin Maalouf brings the struggles in the Levant in the wake of World War II painfully to life. The tribulations and separations of Ossyane and Clara reflect, at an individual level, the problems that have beset the Middle East for fifty years.