Dedalus: 154 books

Mike Mitchell�s translation of Simplicissimus was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. �It is a violent and often all-too-realistic picaresque, set in war-torn Europe during the 17th-century Thirty Years War. Simplicissimus is the eternal innocent, the simple-minded survivor,...

A companion volume to Simplicissimus: the story of young girl named Courage, caught up in the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War, who survives, even prospers, by the use of her native cunning and sexual attraction. Completely amoral, she flits through a succession of husbands and lovers and ends her...

'The first novel from, the renowned storyteller Hugh Lupton opens with a scene that could be straight out of Thomas Hardy... A helpless observer of the damage that enclosure is doing to his beloved landscape and the people who live there, a young man torn between romantic love for his muse, Mary Joyce,...

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. Twelve years on it still seems grimly apposite. William...

Comic, fantastic and grotesque, Walpurgisnacht uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society...

A complex and ambitious novel which centres on the life of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence....

Inspector Cabillot, the first Europanto detective tackles varied European concerns such as a mad cow disease terrorist cell that takes over London and the kidnapping of a major European Union leader by Finnish nationalists who want to replace Europanto with Finnish as the only language of the European...

There is an odd,subversive book called The Decadent Gardener by Medlar Lucan and Durian Gray. The introduction describes the decadent gardening ethos thus:'In the garden, the decadent seeks to create a moment of beauty, which should be allowed to fall into decay and ruin.'Gardening,Lucan and Gray believe,...

'This hideously decadent fin de siecle novel has become an underground classic. There are satirical and allegorical dimensions, but it remains irreducibly horrible.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times ' First published in 1898 this decadent classic flays civilised society down to its hypocritical bones...

'The Interpreter isn't merely the sequel to New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs: it is a singular and deeply felt thesis, a warped manifesto of sorts, derived from a career spent immersed in languages. For Marani is up to his old tricks. Like in its predecessors, the novel comes dripping...

Cousin Bazilio is a tale of sexual folly and hypocrisy and vividly depicts bourgeois life in 19th-century Lisbon. "Sauciness and scandal come as part of the enticing package in this 1878 European classic by Portugal's most celebrated 19th century writer. Cousin Bazilio might not be his best work, but...

The scene has shifted from verdant Italy and steamy Mexico of the Spring and Summer Sonatas to rainy Galicia and wintry Navarre and the court of the pretender Carlos during the final Carlist War in the Autumn and Winter Sonatas. 'Valle-Inclan's descriptive writing comes through delightfully in Margaret...

'It is a fascinating book... Jay is excellent is on the emergence of medical science as a social force.' W.N.Herbert in Scotland on Sunday 'As well as exploding the fantasy that a society without drugs used to exist, Jay clarifies the question of why so many of them were outlawed...in the process,...

Abbe Jules, first published in 1888, is the second part of Octave Mirbeau's autobiographical trilogy and tells the story of a priest's lifelong struggle with his passions. Narrated from the viewpoint of a small boy, it depicts the stifling atmosphere of petit bourgeois, provincial France, where family,...