Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In

Beautifully designed and gorgeously illustrated, this immersive, puzzle-like exploration of the history and psychology of mazes and labyrinths evokes the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure, the textual inventiveness of Tom Stoppard, and the philosophical spirit of Jorge Luis Borges.

Labyrinths are as old as humanity, the proving grounds of heroes, the paths of pilgrims, symbols of spiritual rebirth and pleasure gardens for pure entertainment. Henry Eliot leads us on a twisting journey through the world of mazes, real and imagined, unraveling our ancient, abiding relationship with them and exploring why they continue to fascinate us, from Kafka to Kubrick to the myth of the Minotaur and a quest to solve the disappearance of the legendary Maze King.

Are you ready to step inside?

“Captivating and informative....Getting lost and found in Eliot’s contemplative prose and Quibe’s clever drawings is a...gratifying experience.” Publishers Weekly

“An utterly unique reading experience.” Booklist

“Delightful, ingenious, and beautifully designed.” Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

“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

Henry Eliot is the creative editor of Penguin Classics UK. Before joining Penguin he organized various literary tours, including a mass public pilgrimage for the National Trust (inspired by William Morris), a recreation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that 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 the author of Follow This Thread and Curiocity (with Matt Lloyd-Rose).

Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentinian librarian, liked to quote Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book: “to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.”...

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