Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In

(Paperback)

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Description

An immersive journey into the labyrinthine world of mazes - take hold of Ariadne's thread and turn the page As a rule, we take care not to get lost, so why should we willingly enter a maze Illustrated with a single red line, Follow This Thread traces dozens of real and historical mazes, and their uses in literature, art and film, from Pac-Man and Picasso to Kubrick and Kafka. Henry Eliot reveals our abiding, ancient relationship with mazes and labyrinths, and unpicks the paradoxical psychology involved in walking them, combining the myth of the Minotaur with a quest for the legendary Maze King, who disappeared in 1979. The text coils around the pages, recreating the experience of walking a labyrinth, with its twists and turns, frights and fantasies.

Reviews

Delightful, ingenious and beautifully designed--Philip Pullman

Eliot's book darts with a nimble wit, sentences arcing from one page to the next so you must turn the entire thing as you read, an experience I had not had since the labyrinths of Mark Z Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. Ariadne's red thread runs throughout, a sinuous scribble forming mazes, but also minotaurs and Mephistopheles and Lara Croft.--New Statesman

Genuinely odd . . . you'll want to buy copies for all your friends--Spectator

A hypnotising and strangely physical experience. Uniquely magical, each page offers new delights. Many books are described as 'journeys' but Follow This Thread really is one.--Alan Connor, author of Two Girls, One on Each Knee

real labyrinthine fun ... a remarkable feat of creativity--Bookseller

Beautifully immaculate degree zero prose . . . a coherent and exhilarating experience--Greg Bright, the 'Maze King'

The illustrations encourage the reader to follow a single red line as it surges and zigzags from page to page, sometimes making us read upside down or back to front. It turns reading into a game in which the book is both a puzzle and its own solution, and the results are variously enticing, frustrating and addictive - not unlike a real maze--Guardian

A captivating and informative ode to the maze--Publishers Weekly US

An utterly unique reading experience.--Booklist

Follow This Thread can be thrillingly odd and disconcerting, its narrative twists and turns mirrored as the text shifts through various orientations on the page--Eurogamer

Author Bio

Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book and the presenter of the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics. He has organized various literary tours, including a mass public pilgrimage for the National Trust (inspired by William Morris), a recreation of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which raised money for the National Literacy Trust, a Lake Poets tour of Cumbria and a quest for the Holy Grail based on Malory's Morte D'Arthur. He is also the author of Follow This Thread- A Maze Book to Get Lost In and Curiocity- An Alternative A to Z of London.