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....