Books published by Dedalus Ltd

''''The greatest book by Portugal''s greatest novelist.'' Jose Saramago. The Maias is part of Dedalus'' project to make all of Eca de Queiroz'' major works available in English. Margaret Jull Costa''s translation of The Maias won both The Pen and The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes. According to Publishers Weekly, ''This novel stands with the great achievements of fiction.''

Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hypocrisy and vividly depicts life in nineteenth-century lisbon. Eca gives us a whole gallery of characters from Bazilio, the suave villain to Jorge, the smugly uxorious husband, from Luiza, the bored empty-headed wife to Juliana, the plain, ailing maidservant desperate, by whatever means, to grab some of life's little luxuries, from Leopoldina, nicknamed' the Ever-Open Door', to Joana the cook and her affair with the tubercular carpenter who lives opposite, and the voluminous Dona Felidade who nurses an entirely unrequited passion for the unbearably pompous Acacio, who lives in concubinage with his much younger housekeeper, who is also having an affair... 'Adultery, blackmail, sentimentality and lust all come under Eca's scrutiny. Sins are scattered amid a gallery of vivid characters, central of which are the adulterous heroine, her first love, the cuckolded husband, and most importantly, the maid. This cunning portrayal of life below stairs casts a cold eye across the hypocrisy of 'respectability, ' recreating the sultry summer heat of Lisbon and the tensions and passions underlying both the refinements of the wealthy and the loyalty of the servants. Sheer brilliance.' The Good Book Guide

A welcome return for Pat Gray's classic tale of friendship between the Cat, Mouse and Rat. The Cat finds himself abandoned without food in an unfurnished house. At first he consorts with his old friends, Mouse and Rat; the one addicted to cheese and philosophy, the other to flashy Italian suits and style, but gradually the Cat gives way to his normal cat-like urges. At first guilty, then elated at his new freedom, and the beneficial impact this has on the other residents, the Cat falls prey to a new and troubling vision of how the house might be, with more initiative and enterprise, and more discipline for the likes of Mouse and Rat. Gradually the Cat unleashes new forces on the house and the gardens beyond, achieving ever greater things, except that, as he does so, he finds himself more and more alone.

Light-Headed is a zany, anarchic black comedy which satirises life in contemporary Russia. At its heart is the question what is important in life and what sacrifices an individual should be expected to make for the good of others. Maxim T. Yermakov was born with an empty space in his head above his brain. As a child this led to him being four kilos less than the normal weight until his mother force-fed him. Always aware of feeling light-headed Maxim was good at school, acquiring information not from books but out of the air. He left the provinces for Moscow where he worked as a brand manager for a chocolate manufacturer. He was contemplating buying his first flat when one day two sinister individuals turned up at the factory to see him. His light head was causing all sorts of problems, it was an alpha object which created natural disasters, terrorist outrages and buildings to collapse. Maxim T. Yermakov's existence threatened the well-being of the state and its citizens. He should do the decent thing and commit suicide. Maxim T. Yermakov refused and began his unequal struggle with the organs of the state.

Following on from "Codename Xenophon", this is a 2nd adventure for private investigator George Zakiris, in crisis-torn Greece.

Courage is one of most indomitable women in European literature and a feminist icon for our times. The Life of Courage (first published in 1670), one episode from whose life Brecht used as the basis for his Mother Courage, is the female counterpart to Simplicissimus. A young girl caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years War, she survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning and sexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits from man to man, having a succession of husbands and lovers, and ends her life with a band of gypsies. Courage supposedly tells her story to get her own back on Simplicissimus, who treats her rather dismissively in his memoirs. Her method is to reveal the truth about herself, including the fact that she was recovering from the pox at the time of their affair, so that he will be tarred with the same brush. The result is a lively account of lechery, knavery and trickery told with disarming frankness and a complete lack of remorse. It will appeal to anyone who likes a rollicking good yarn and a bit of knavery in their reading.

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, a skilled tattooist, and eventually decides to undergo the process himself. He chooses a Latin phrase in the form of a cross: vulnerant omnes, ultima necat - 'they all (the hours) wound, the last one kills'. Once it has been done, his whole being seems to change, his feelings about himself and, especially, his attitude to women. Soon however, the first two words of the tattoo fade and ultima necat becomes a threat dominating his life. Ink in the Blood was published in France in 2013.

The Dedalus Book of Slovak Literature offers a wide-ranging selection of fiction from the end of the nineteenth century until the present day, including work by Slovak's classic and most important contemporary authors such as Rudolf Sloboda, Dominik Tatarka, Opavel Vilikovsky, Monika Kompanikova and Balla. This is the most important selection of Slovak fiction to have appeared in English and will be essential reading for anyone wanting to gain an idea of Slovak Literature.

Katinka is the stationmaster's wife in a sleepy Danish provincial town and her domestic languor is disrupted by the arrival of Huus, the new foreman on a nearby farm. Unlike her boorish husband Huus is attentive and sensitive and despite her best efforts Katinka falls in love with him. Her whole life is turned upside down by an intense passion she had never expected to experience and which has unforeseen consequences. Katinka is another of Herman Bang's tragic heroines. In its impressionistic almost cinematic style it is a novel ahead of its time.

Domingo Salazar is a Dominican monk and Vatican secret agent in a near future theocratic Italy ruled by the Vatican. A cell of dissidents is helping sufferers commit euthanasia. His job is to root out such non-believers and heretics.

'Waddington employs a cheerful surrealism to convey the superhuman status of his cyclists and the designer violence of his killer. The encounters with death are funny rather than frightening and the narrator is omnipotent, stylish and amused. Waddington's descriptions of racing, and they are many and enthralling, have the rhythm and intensity of poetry. You're riding with your wheel an inch from the author's, carried along by the surge of the pack, normal life and normal people no more than a muted clamour on the roadside. It's exhilarating stuff.' Joe Cogan in The Independent on Sunday 'Racy thriller in which top pros in the Tour de France become ensnared in a Faustian pact with a sports doctor who guarantees success but demands the ultimate price: their lives. Appeared in 1998, the year of the sport's biggest ever drug scandal... it still seems grimly apposite.' William Fotheringham's Top 10 Cycling Novels in The Guardian

The protagonist, Father Llatzer, a priest banished for doctrinal heresy to an isolated, backward mountain parish, struggles to achieve personal redemption by bringing salvation to his primitive, taciturn, rural flock. Their mute atavism is disturbed only by the local whore, Footloose, embodying all the forces against which the priest's reforming mission is directed. Ambiguity surrounds the denouement of that conflict. Dark Vales is as as compelling today as when it was first written.

Set in a psychiatric clinic in Moscow in the long decades of late-Soviet stagnation, Before and During sweeps the reader away from its dismal surroundings on a series of fantastical excursions into the Russian past.e ]We meet Leo Tolstoy's twin brother, eaten by the great writer in his mother's womb, only to be born as Tolstoy's 'son'; the philosopher-hermit Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed that the common task of humanity was the physical resurrection of their ancestors; a self-replicating Madame de Staa-l who, during her second life, is carried through plague-ridden Russia in a glass palanquin and becomes Fyodorov's lover; and the composer Alexander Scriabin, who preaches to Lenin on the shores of Lake Geneva.e ]Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies -- all described in a serious, steady voice -- Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation and God. 'Before and During is not a historical novel. Rather, it is closer to one of Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque venues, a Menippean satire in which historical reality, in all its irreversible awfulness, is for a moment scrambled, eroticized ... and illuminated by hilarious monologues of the dead... There are wonderful stretches: an exegesis of Tolstoy's failure to achieve the good in his own family;... an astonishing olfactory history of the First World War and Revolution through Scriabin's music. How Sharov resolves the rejection of death is especially good... With this elegant and dry-eyed translation by Oliver Ready, anglophone audiences can finally weigh in.' Caryl Emerson in The Times Literary Supplement 'Sharov has assimilated, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the artistic and philosophical legacy of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Russian literature. Like Dostoevsky, he is excessive not in order to deny, misrepresent, or flee reality but, rather, to capture it more accurately.' Thomas Epstein, Boston College

First published in 1880, same year as Edgar Degas' "The Dancing Lesson and Edouard Manet's solo show, these "Parisian Sketches share the Impressionist fascination with the contemporary life of Paris, the exuberant Paris of the Opera Garnier and the Folies-Bergers. Like the striking images of the early Impressionists, "Parisian Sketches is an assault on the visual senses. Composed of a series of intense, meticulously observed literary impressions--of cafe concerts and circus performers, of streetwalkers and hot-chestnut sellers, of forgotten quarters in the grimy, shiny 'City of Light'--"Parisian Sketches recreates Paris with an intimacy and immediacy that confirms Huysmans as one of the masters of 19th century French prose.

Barbara is a Faroese Moll Flanders, a woman of insatiable sexual desire which leads her from one man to another in search of sexual gratification. There is a highly successful Danish feature film of the novel. Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen's novel combines the action of an old Faroese ballad about a woman who led three clergymen husbands to their destruction and the author's own experience of a woman with whom he was in love, but who proved elusive in the manner of the fictitious Barbara. The novel was unfinished when Jacobsen died, and it was left to, his friend and fellow author, William Heinesen to tie up a small number of loose ends.

Marie Grubbe is loosely based on the true story of a Danish noble woman of the same name. A wealthy heiress she married the illegitimate son of Frederik The Third of Denmark and Norway. The relationship was unhappy and violent, and, after she had had several affairs, her husband divorced her allowing her to keep her substantial dowry. For the next two years, Marie Grubbe travelled around Europe with her brother-in-law and lover spending the fortune her mother had left her. On her return her father married her to a local nobleman but this relationship too was unhappy. At the age of forty-six, she finally met the man who was going to be her companion for the rest of her life: a coachman more than twenty years her junior. A wonderful historical novel and one of the jewels of Danish 19-th century fiction

W. Glyn Jones' masterful translation allows us to read in English for the first time one of the neglected classics of Scandinavian Literature. Ida Brandt is the classic outsider. Not acceptable to the Danish aristocratic circle she was brought up around and too moneyed for her nursing colleagues at the hospital. She is good looking and gentle, generous and kind and her trusting nature is betrayed by the people around her. Herman Bang takes us into Ida's world, he does not comment, let alone criticise and leaves the reader to judge. It is a novel ahead of its time in its impressionistic, almost cinematic style.

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 young son, after which Ivan -- who is a Vostyach, an imaginary ethnic group of whose language he is the last remaining speaker -- is struck dumb by what he has witnessed. Some twenty years later the guards desert their posts and Ivan walks free, together with the other inmates. Guided by some mysterious power, he returns to the region he originally came from...

Pascal Bruckner's memoir reads like a novel, a Bildungsroman which charts his journey from pious Catholic child to leading philosopher and writer on French culture. The key figure in Bruckner's life is his father, a virulent anti-Semite, who voluntarily went to work in Germany during the Second World War. He is a violent man who beats his wife. The young Bruckner soon reacts against his father and his revenge is to become his polar opposite, even to the point of being happy to be called a "Jewish thinker", which he is not. "My father helped me to think better by thinking against him. I am his defeat." Despite this opposition, he remains tied to his father to the very end. He has other "fathers", men such as Sartre, Vladimir Jankelevitch and Roland Barthes who fostered his philosophical development, and describes his friendship with his "philosophical twin brother", Alain Finkielkraut. A great read for anyone interested in the 1960s, the intellectual life of France and the father and son relationship.

Heinesen's novels always contain the portrait of what might be termed a "good" woman: Simona in Windswept Dawn, Eliana in The Lost Musicians, Liva in The Black Cauldron. Here, however, the "good" woman, Antonia, is raised to mythological status as the representative of motherhood, the bearer of life as has existed from the dawn of time. This portrayal is placed against the description of a limited circle of ordinary and unprepossessing figures in a small town, much of it as experienced through the eyes of Antonia's infant illegitimate son from his very earliest days until he is some five years of age. In contrast to Antonia, there is Trine, an essentially tragic figure, whose tragedy to a large extent is the direct result of her narrow religious beliefs and her resultant refusal to follow her natural instincts and to take the chance of happiness and the natural fulfilment of life when it is offered to her. Religion is in this novel portrayed exclusively in negative terms in stark contrast to the world of nature, the bearer of life, the supreme representative of which is Antonia.