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. 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.... 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.

Lawrence Norfolk's In the Shape of a Boar is a juggernaut of a novel, an epic tour de force of love and betrayal, ancient myths and modern horrors. The story begins in the ancient world of mythic Greece, where a dark tale of treachery and destructive love unfolds amid the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon -- a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of World War II, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer on a mission of vengeance. After the war, a young Jewish Romanian refugee, Solomon Memel, who was among the hunters will create a poem based on the experience, which becomes an international literary sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love in 1970s Paris, the dark memories and horrors of those days will emerge anew. ".... classical Greek culture and twentieth-century barbarism, the nature of...