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An international best-seller and winner of the Somerset Maugham
Prize, Lempriere's Dictionary is the debut novel from Lawrence
Norfolk, one of England's most innovative, internationally
acclaimed young authors. In eighteenth-century London, John
Lempriere works feverishly on a celebrated dictionary of classical
mythology that bears his name. He discovers a conspiracy against
his family dating back 150 years. Told with the narrative drive of
a political thriller and a Dickensian panorama of place and time,
this astonishing tale encompasses the Great Voyages of Discovery,
multinational financial conspiracies, and a motley cast of scholars
and eccentrics, drunken aristocrats, whores and assassins, and
octogenarian pirates, all brilliantly depicted across three
continents and the world of classical mythology.
This book is about the madness of everyday life under a
dictatorship. It shifts in theme and time, testing the borderlines
of prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, history and
autobiography - all in the unassuming guise of a children's ABC.
The Last Window-Giraffe is a playful and personal journey through
the political unrest of the seventies and eighties. It was inspired
by a Hungarian children's dictionary, entitled Window-Giraffe,
which explained the whole world in simple terms; a world where
everything was in order and all problems were easily solved.Popular
across Europe for the best part of a decade, The Last
Window-Giraffe is a politically infused rendition of the original:
quirky, astute and powerful. Peter Zilahy draws on his travels
around the 'soft dictatorships' of Eastern Europe, offering his
acerbic observations on the often bizarre spectacle. In one
instance, he describes the carnival-like protests against the
Milosevic regime in Belgrade simply and humorously. This reflects,
like the format of the book, the manner in which the regime treat
their people like children. Filled with his own striking
photographs, Zilahy gives fascinating insight into a whole other
universe behind the Iron Curtain. The Last Window-Giraffe is one of
the most unusual, beguiling books you will ever read."
"An important and inspiring novel."
VOICE LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
It is 18th-century London and John Lempriere, a young scholar, is
writing a dictionary of classical mythology in an attempt to
exorcise the demons raised by his father's violent and bizarre
death. While tending to his father's business affairs, Lempriere
discovers a 150-year old conspiracy that has kept his family from
its share of the fabulously wealthy East India Company. But as John
begins to untangle the years of mystery and deceit, people begin to
die, in ways that mirror the very myths he is researching....
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