The cerebral thriller Codex drops up-and-coming investment banker wunderkind Edward Wozny into the musty realm of medieval literature, where he finds an unexpected break from the rat race--a powerful client's commission to uncrate and organise a library. The diversion quickly becomes an obsession after he enlists the help of the quirkily attractive scholar Margaret Napier. Together they discover his employer, the mysterious Duchess of Bowmry, is in a race with her husband to locate an apocryphal codex that could destroy the Bowmry name. Meanwhile, Edward becomes engrossed in an addictive computer game that bears an uncanny similarity to the object of his search and accelerates his transformation from Wall Street wizard into shiftless dreamer.

I brought this book looking for something to get caught up into and was very disappointed! The story had all the protential of being great. In this book, you are told a satisfying amount about the codex – or book – which the title refers to. Possibly this might be because Lev Grossman seems to know his medieval English literature. He’s not above showing off his knowledge of the literature of the period. The book has its own echoes of Chaucer’s ‘Boke of the Duchesse “ , and also of “Sir Gawaine and the Grene Knyght “. However, although this is a strength, it may also be a weakness. For if you are not at all familiar with the world in which the codex was supposedly conceived, then you lose out on a lot of the texture beneath the surface of the book, as I did.

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