Short Synopsis
Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

Full Synopsis
In the tradition of Simon Winchester and Dava Sobel, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code tells one of the most intriguing stories in the history of language, masterfully blending history, linguistics, and cryptology with an elegantly wrought narrative.

When famed archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed the ruins of a sophisticated Bronze Age civilization that flowered on Crete 1,000 years before Greece's Classical Age, he discovered a cache of ancient tablets, Europe's earliest written records. For half a century, the meaning of the inscriptions, and even the language in which they were written, would remain a mystery.

Award-winning New York Times journalist Margalit Fox's riveting real-life intellectual detective story travels from the Bronze Age Aegean—the era of Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Helen—to the turn of the 20th century and the work of charismatic English archeologist Arthur Evans, to the colorful personal stories of the decipherers. These include Michael Ventris, the brilliant amateur who deciphered the script but met with a sudden, mysterious death that may have been a direct consequence of the decipherment; and Alice Kober, the unsung heroine of the story whose painstaking work allowed Ventris to crack the code.

"Ward's reading is well paced, and her vocal variation helps to hold the listener's attention as she describes the finer points of linguistic analysis." ---AudioFile

"Ward keeps to the spirit of the enterprise and,
rather than adopting a professorial tone, reads the book like she's speaking one-on-one to the listener. . . . A splendid book, splendidly narrated." ---Booklist Audio Review

"Fox is a talented storyteller, and she creates an atmosphere of almost nail-biting suspense. . . . This one deserves shelf space along such classics of the genre as Simon Singh's The Code Book." ---Booklist Starred Review

"Fox recreates the emergence of one of history's most vexing puzzles---and then puts [listeners] alongside the remarkable figures who, brilliantly, obsessively, and even tragically, devoted their lives to solving it. Forget the Da Vinci Code. This is the real thing." ---Toby Lester, author of Da Vinci's Ghost

Saroyan Prize for International Writing

Booklist Review

New York Times Bestseller