Daedalus Books

Eleven of the best and most popular tales of the immortal sleuth include Silver Blaze, concerning the curious incident of the dog in the night-time; The Greek Interpreter, starring Holmes' even more formidable brother, Mycroft; and The Final Problem, the detective's notorious confrontation with arch-criminal Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

The Queen of Mystery has come to Harper Collins! Agatha Christie, the acknowledged mistress of suspense — creator of indomitable sleuth Miss Marple, meticulous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and so many other unforgettable characters — brings her entire oeuvre of ingenious whodunits, locked room mysteries, and perplexing puzzles to Harper Paperbacks. Time is ticking away for a murderer in Christie's classic, The Clocks, as Poirot investigates the strange case of a corpse surrounded by numerous timepieces in a blind woman's house.

Following on from the huge success of the 44 Scotland Street series, Alexander McCall Smith has 'moved house' to a crumbling four-storey mansion in Pimlico — Corduroy Mansions. It is inhabited by a glorious assortment of characters: among them, Oedipus Snark, the first ever nasty Lib Dem MP, who is so detestable his own mother, Berthea, is writing an unauthorised biography about him; and one small vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, who has the ability to fasten his own seatbelt. Although Corduroy Mansions is a fictional name, the address is now registered by the Post Office.

'If you do not want to dwell with evil-doers', wrote Richard of Devizes in 1180, 'do not live in London'. In her third exploration of the city's history, Catharine Arnold focuses on the sex trade, from slave girls brought to service Roman troops in first century Londinium, through medieval stews, 18th century sex clubs and Victorian male brothels to infamous '60s call girls and the internet 'Belle de Jour'.

Take a round-the-world trip and bring back a timeless souvenir. Our Passport Journals will allow you to revisit your memories and fulfill that wanderlust long after your travels have been completed. The pocket-sized hardcover books contain designed pages which re-create the international feel of an actual passport.

What happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a novel create its unique effects, so distinct from those of a painting, a film, or a poem? In this inspired, thoughtful, deeply personal book, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the worlds of the writer and the reader, revealing their intimate connections. Pamuk draws on Friedrich Schiller's famous distinction between 'naive' poets — who write spontaneously, serenely, unselfconsciously — and 'sentimental' poets: those who are reflective, emotional, questioning, and alive to the artifice of the written word. Harking back to the beloved novels of his youth and ranging through the work of such writers as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Mann, and Naipaul, he explores the oscillation between the naive and the reflective, and the search for an equilibrium, that lie at the center of the novelist's craft. He ponders the novel's visual and sensual power — its ability to conjure landscapes so vivid they can make the here-and-now fade away. In the course of this exploration, he considers the elements of character, plot, time, and setting that compose the 'sweet illusion' of the fictional world. Anyone who has known the pleasure of becoming immersed in a novel will enjoy, and learn from, this perceptive book by one of the modern masters of the art.

Don't just visit London, record it (or imagine it) in this beautifully made pocket travel journal. Measuring 4 x 6 inches closed, it features a sewn binding, fancy black endpapers, and a textured black hard cover embossed with the city's name. Inside you'll find pages of transit and street maps and traveler's information, including places to dine, shop, and visit. The book also has an expanding storage pocket, a ribbon marker and closure band, and cream pages that are lined on the right-hand side and blank on the left, allowing you to write and illustrate your adventures.

Don't just visit London, record it (or imagine it) in this beautifully made pocket travel journal. Measuring 4 x 6 inches closed, it features a sewn binding, fancy red endpapers, and a textured red hard cover embossed with the city's name. Inside you'll find pages of transit and street maps and traveler's information, including places to dine, shop, and visit. The book also has an expanding storage pocket, a ribbon marker and closure band, and cream pages that are lined on the right-hand side and blank on the left, allowing you to write and illustrate your adventures.

Portable enough to pack (just 6 x 8 3/4 inches closed) yet spacious enough to wax philosophical about the best and worst of days, this two-sided journal will let you keep your feelings safe even when you're on the go. Whatever your mood, this ruled, wire-bound journal has the place to write about it — open the «Nice» side for entries about kittens and puppies and tea parties; turn it over and open the «Naughty» side to talk about taxes and exes and the outfit you shouldn't have worn last night.

Portable enough to pack yet spacious enough to wax philosophical about the best and worst of days, this two-sided journal will let you keep your feelings safe even when you're on the go. Whatever your mood, this ruled, wire-bound journal has the place to write about it — open the «Nice» side for entries about kittens and puppies and tea parties; turn it over and open the «Naughty» side to talk about taxes and exes and the outfit you shouldn't have worn last night.

In 200 page-filling black and white photos from the archives of London's Daily Mail, this album chronicles the singular musical career of John Lennon, from his days with the Quarry Men in 1958, along with Paul McCartney and George Harrison, to the days before and after his murder on December 8, 1980. Among the classic, rarely seen, and never before published photos here are early performances with the Beatles in the Cavern Club, the rise of Beatlemania, the band's psychedelic period, the inauguration of Apple Corp, John's life with Yoko Ono, the Beatles' breakup, and his subsequent career as an activist, musician, and father.

» This is a smaller, gift version of National Geographic's landmark publication, «»Through the Lens»». «Through the Lens» is a cornucopia of National Geographic's best photographs created since 1890 when the Society first started commissioning photographers to go out into the world and bring images back to its readership. Many of the 250 photographs have been previously published in the magazine but a great number of them are images that did not make the final edit but have great merit on their own. Readers can take a virtual tour around the world to see rice sellers in the Mekong Delta, teenagers in Brazil, duck hunters in Nebraska, and stingrays in the Cayman Islands, to name a few examples. You also move seamlessly back and forth in time, from the days when travellers climbed mountain trails by mule to color-filled lofty airplane rides above the Galapagos Islands with a greater appreciation for technological advancements and the chance to suspend time either way.

Winners of 22 Grammy Awards — more than any other band — U2 have sold over 150m records. Whilst maintaining their reputation as one of the top rock bands of the modern era, U2 have pursued personal and ideological goals including relief of world poverty and social justice whilst also on a musical journey that has embraced many different styles.

In 250 glorious photographs Wide Angle: National Geographic Greatest Places documents the beauty and depth of every part of the world. Delving deeply into a picture archive that houses over ten million images, with many photographs being published for the first time, this new book-the third and final in the greatest photographs series-presents the world's amazingly diverse places with epic grandeur, unparalleled intimacy, romantic beauty, and gritty realism. The photographs are landscapes, cityscapes, famous landmarks, and unfamiliar spots that reveal special qualities of geography or culture one might otherwise never see. Spanning more than eleven decades, the images in Wide Angle are divided into twelve chapters, each depicting a unique geography — including East and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Polar Regions. Each chapter is introduced by award-winning cultural writer and critic Ferdinand Protzman, whose essays accent the stunning photographs by renowned National Geographic photographers. Both essays and photographs carefully examine a region's special qualities, creating unique character and its own special and unforgettable sense of place. In Wide Angle, National Geographic photographers have recorded the world's places close up, in sweeping breadth, in depth, and over time.

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work of art and a grandly entertaining overture to our new century: a bold, comic, tragic, deeply moving family drama that stretches from the Midwest at mid-century to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of greed and globalism. Franzen brings an old-time America of freight trains and civic duty, of Cub Scouts and Christmas cookies and sexual inhibitions, into brilliant collision with the modern absurdities of brain science, home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and the anti-gravity New Economy. With The Corrections, Franzen emerges as one of our premier interpreters of American society and the American soul. Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it's the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson's disease, or maybe it's his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn't seem to understand a word Enid says. Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid's children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel and materialistic and is trying to force his parents out of their old house and into a tiny apartment. The middle child, Chip, has suddenly and for no good reason quit his exciting job as a professor at D. College and moved to New York City, where he seems to be pursuing a «transgressive» lifestyle and writing some sort of screenplay. Meanwhile the baby of the family, Denise, has escaped her disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man — or so Gary hints. Enid, who loves to have fun, can still look forward to a final family Christmas and to the ten-day Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise that she and Alfred are about to embark on. But even these few remaining joys are threatened by her husband's growing confusion and unsteadiness. As Alfred enters his final decline, the Lamberts must face the failures, secrets, and long-buried hurts that haunt them as a family if they are to make the corrections that each desperately needs.

From the great storyteller of modern Russian historians, the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age. The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale — these are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed three great empires — the British, Turkish, and Russian — in a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come. In this masterful history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jerusalem; from the young Tolstoy reporting in Sevastopol to Tsar Nicolas, haunted by dreams of religious salvation, and the ordinary soldiers and nurses in the battlefields and towns under siege. Original, magisterial, alive with voices of the time, The Crimean War is a historical tour de force.

Acclaimed biographer Peter Ackroyd vibrantly resurrects the legendary epic of Camelot in this modern adaptation. The names of Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, the sword of Excalibur, and the court of Camelot are as recognizable as any from the world of myth. Although many versions exist of the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory endures as the most moving and richly inventive. In this abridged retelling the inimitable Peter Ackroyd transforms Malory's fifteenth-century work into a dramatic modern story, vividly bringing to life a world of courage and chivalry, magic, and majesty. The golden age of Camelot, the perilous search for the Holy Grail, the love of Guinevere and Lancelot, and the treachery of Arthur's son Mordred are all rendered into contemporary prose with Ackroyd's characteristic charm and panache. Just as he did with his fresh new version of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Ackroyd now brings one of the cornerstones of English literature to a whole new audience.

Kids will love to learn the alphabet and first words with this wonderful pop-up book. Each page is packed with bright illustrations surrounding a fun pop-up block in the middle.

One hundred years after J. M. Barrie published the novel Peter and Wendy, Maria Tatar revisits a story that, like Alice in Wonderland, bridges the generations, animating both adults and children with its kinetic energy. The adventures of the Darling children with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell in Neverland are the seminal tale of escape and fantasy. Inspired by Barrie's real-life adventures with the five Llewelyn Davies boys he adopted, the story of Peter Pan has a deep and controversial history of its own that comes alive in Tatar's new edition. This brilliantly designed volume with period photographs, full-color images by iconic illustrators, commentary on stage and screen versions, and an array of supplementary material, including Barrie's screenplay for a silent film will draw readers into worlds of incandescent beauty, flooding them with the radiance of childhood wonder and the poignancy of what we lose when we grow up.

After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking stories — interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as binary — join Solzhenitsyn's already available work as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century. With Soviet and post-Soviet life as their focus, they weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In The Upcoming Generation, a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In Nastenka, two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives — until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both. The most eloquent and acclaimed opponent of government oppression, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and his work continues to receive international acclaim. Available for the first time in English, Apricot Jam: And Other Stories is a striking example of Solzhenitsyn's singular style and only further solidifies his place as a true literary giant.

The Best American Comics showcases the work of both established and up-and-coming contributors. Editor Alison Bechdel — creater of the cult comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and author of Fun Home — has culled the best stories from graphic novels, pamplet comics, newspapers, magazines, mini-comics and webcomics to create this cutting-edge collection. With entries from Joe Sacco, Jeff Smith, and Dash Shaw, this edtion delivers a thrilling and varied journey from start to finish.

Rife with humor and personality, this very young middle grade novel has a classic old-fashioned feel and a package equipped with the makings of a modern classic. In Bless This Mouse, a very resilient and quirky colony of church mice fear yet another Great X (more than they fear cats!), but under Mouse Matriarch Hildegarde's leadership, they band together and save themselves from impending doom — even if it's just by the skin of their tails! Lois Lowry is no stranger to delighting middle grade audiences. Lowry's acclaimed Gooney Bird series was championed by School Library Journal as [a] fine selection for beginning chapter book readers and as a read-aloud. Lemony Snicket gave The Willoughbys a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, while Kirkus called it a sparklingly smart satire. More recently published on our Spring 2010 list is Lowry's Birthday Ball with wonderfully swirly, evocative, energetic character sketches by the fabulous Feiffer (SLJ) which Booklist hailed an original fairy tale with a decidedly comical twist in its starred review.

Tessa Gray descends into Victorian London's dark underworld to search for her missing brother, with the mysterious Shadowhunters as her only allies.

'Brilliant, deeply shocking' — New York Review of Books. Bucky Wunderlick is a rock and roll star. Dissatisfied with a life that has brought fame and fortune, he suddenly decides he no longer wants to be a commodity. He leaves his band mid-tour and holes up in a dingy, unfurnished apartment in Great Jones Street. Unfortunately, his disappearing act only succeeds in inflaming interest... DeLillo's third novel is more than a musical satire: it probes the rights of the individual, foreshadows the struggle of the artist within a capitalist world and delivers a scathing portrait of our culture's obsession with the lives of the few. 'DeLillo has the force and imagination of Thomas Pynchon or John Barth, with a sense of proportion and style which these would-be giants often lack' — Irish Times.