The Lost Books of the Odyssey

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After ten years’ journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead.In these forty-four retellings of passages from Homer’s Odyssey, Zachary Mason uses Homer’s linear narrative and explodes it: presenting alternative and contradictory fragments of familiar stories – the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens – allowing us to see Homer’s masterpiece afresh. Elegant, provocative and utterly fascinating, The Lost Books of the Odyssey seems destined to become a modern classic.

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