Lemprière's Dictionary

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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.