Salamander - by Thomas Wharton (Paperback)

About the Book

Summoned to Slovakia by an eccentric count who wants to create the "infinite book, " 18th-century London printer Nicholas Flood falls in love with the count's only daughter. Their child, Pica, travels around the world with Flood as he searches for the elusive materials needed for the count's "infinite book."

Book Synopsis

Nicholas Flood, an unassuming eighteenth-century London printer, specializes in novelty books -- books that nestle into one another, books comprised of one spare sentence, books that emit the sounds of crashing waves. When his work captures the attention of an eccentric Slovakian count, Flood is summoned to a faraway castle -- a moving labyrinth that embodies the count's obsession with puzzles -- where he is commissioned to create the infinite book, the ultimate never-ending story. Probing the nature of books, the human thirst for knowledge, and the pursuit of immortality, Salamander careens through myth and metaphor as Flood travels the globe in search of materials for the elusive book without end.

Review Quotes

Edmonton Journal This novel cannot help but connect deeply with its readers...[It is] a sprawling, lush fable that is equal parts adventure, romance, treatise, and history...[Wharton] strikes off across an exotic terrain already brilliantly traversed by such figures as Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino.

Montreal Gazette Witty, elliptical and provoking...Delightful.

Quill & Quire A vigorous, imaginative novel about the power of reading and invention.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Salamander leaves an exotic flavour in the mouth, and will reward its readers with the sense that they have been taken on a strange journey.

About the Author

Thomas Wharton's first novel, Icefields, won the Writers Guild of Alberta Best First Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Prize. It is available from Washington Square Press. Wharton lives in Edmonton, Canada, with his wife and children.