formulate nested select

I cannot find anything on google or the manuals/tutorials that gives some kin of clear explanation of how to so nested selects with where or whatever. I have three tables: books, authors and book-authors. I need to retrieve only those books whose author's names begin with A. I have tried several maniipulations of where and select with select subqueries and I cannot get results from the queries. For example "SELECT * FROM book b, book_authors c (SELECT id FROM author WHERE LEFT(author.last_name = $Auth )) as a WHERE a.id = c.authID && b.id = c.bookID ....<snip> $Auth = A echoes as A var_dump returns boolean false and I get a warning - mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not valid.... It is obvious that the syntax is ok, but there is something here that I do not understand. It would appear that this should be something very simple, but I don't see logic working here since I can not do this either "SELECT * FROM book b, book_authors c, author a WHERE c.authID = (SELECT a.id WHERE LEFT(a.last_name) = $Auth) && b.id = c.bookID ... I would really appreciate some help & clarification. TIA -- unheralded genius: "A clean desk is the sign of a dull mind. " ------------------------------------------------------------- Phil Jourdan --- pj@ptahhotep.com http://www.ptahhotep.com http://www.chiccantine.com/andypantry.php