''It is not that Ulysses excludes us; it is, rather, that it includes us in ways that no other work prepares us for. The question is not ''what is a novel?'', but what can a novel be? Ulysses is the answer''

Patrick McGuinness from his preface to Ulysses: The Restored Text

Initially rejected by several printers in Dublin and London for containing ''obscene'' content, Ulysses was first published in book form in a limited-edition printing of 1000 copies by Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1922. A subsequent printing was impounded by US customs and for a period the novel was famed for its notoriety rather than its literary achievement.

Like its author, Ulysses exists in a complicated push-pull relationship with its language - English - and its setting - Ireland. Joyce returns to the themes that had preoccupied him in previous works, including nationalism and empire, religion, identity and sex in a novel which gloriously brings Dublin on June 16th 1904 to the page.

This edition of Ulysses: The Restored Text includes the revisions that Joyce made to the novel during his lifetime.