Finnegans Wake

The most difficult book ever written. Also the most playful.

James Joyce's final masterpiece is a dream—a vast, punning, multi-lingual, history-spanning, myth-dissolving, grammar-defying dream. It is the most challenging novel in the English language. It is also, for those who find their way inside, the most rewarding.

The book opens in the middle of a sentence and ends with the definite article that completes the opening sentence, suggesting an endless cycle. The protagonist—if he can be called that—is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, a pub owner in Chapelizod, Dublin. He is also Finn MacCool, the legendary Irish giant. He is also Adam, Noah, the Duke of Wellington, and every other father figure in history. His wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle, is the River Liffey. His sons, Shem and Shaun, are the artist and the bureaucrat, the rebel and the conformist. His daughter, Issy, is the mirror of femininity.

The plot—if it can be called that—involves a rumor about something Earwicker did in the park. The rumor is told, retold, distorted, denied, and transformed. The book follows the structure of Giambattista Vico's philosophy of history: cycles of divine, heroic, human, and ricorso (return). It is a book about sleep, language, history, and the way stories change every time they are told.

Joyce invented a language for Finnegans Wake that combines English with dozens of other languages, puns, portmanteaus, and neologisms. The word "finnegans" (no apostrophe) is both plural and possessive, referring to the ballad of Finnegan (who falls off a ladder and is revived by whiskey) and to the idea of "waking" as a continual process.

This is Joyce at his most liberated and unhinged: a novel that refuses to be read in the ordinary way, insisting instead that you let go of linear narrative, logical syntax, and the distinction between waking and dreaming.

• Published in 1939, Joyce's final novel, seventeen years in the writing

• Subtitled "Work in Progress" during its serialization (1927–1938)

• The source of the phrase "quark," later adopted by physicist Murray Gell-Mann for a subatomic particle

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

• Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.

• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that a dream is not a puzzle to be solved, but a world to be inhabited.

About the Author

James Joyce (1882–1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Dublin, he left Ireland in 1904 and spent most of his adult life in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. His major works include Dubliners(1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). Finnegans Wake was written over a period of seventeen years, during which Joyce suffered from near-blindness and his daughter Lucia's mental illness. The book was published on his fifty-seventh birthday. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941. The title comes from an Irish ballad, "Finnegan's Wake," about a bricklayer who falls from a ladder and is thought dead, only to be revived by whiskey at his wake. Joyce died in Zurich in 1941.