THIS ONE IS A REAL PAGE TURNER...

Amazing! A book about mazes that creates its own enchanting world of labyrinthine trickery. Don’t try reading it on a Kindle...

Follow This Thread Henry Eliot Particular Books £16.99 (€19.24)

How could a book about mazes not play games with its reader? Every page turns a corner and presents something familiar, or surprising, and often both. We see mazes from fiction that we half remember: from Les Misérables and James Bond, to Three Men In A Boat. Early on, we encounter Lewis Carroll’s Alice; she reappears later, and then again, leaving us wondering: haven’t we been here before?

We learn how to guarantee safe exit from any labyrinth (touch either the left- or right-hand wall and keep your hand on it as you walk), but also that a labyrinth is not the same thing as a maze. A maze is sneakier and usually has forked paths and dead ends. Labyrinths are ancient; mazes have been around for only 600 years.

And we follow author Henry Eliot as he tries to find the legendary, lost designer of real-life mazes, Greg Bright. The journey is, naturally, circuitous – and its end point is haunting. Bright has pondered mazes so deeply and created such beautiful examples that he has flipped. ‘I have ceased even to like mazes. I dislike them.’ The diverse tales are threaded together by a single red line that runs from the first page to the last, sometimes weaving itself into an illustration. Twenty-four pages in, a trick begins: the words do not always appear in the normal places, and you have to turn the book around as you turn its pages. The device at first risks seeming gimmicky but soon makes the reader aware that they have engaged their sense of direction. It evokes the spirit of mazes: getting lost, on purpose, for fun. Holding and turning this splendid little book is a remarkably physical experience. There is no point in reading it on a Kindle.

Publication is due in April