Penelope's Web

A salt-bitten stranger from the sea, a war-torn wolf, Odysseus returns to Ithaca, crushes the claimants to his throne and bed, and confronts his wife, Penelope. But, the story does not end there, it's the start of another. After years of fighting and wandering, a war hero can find home more hellish than the battlefield, peace more awful than war. War changes everything . . . Christopher Rush has created a unique and dynamic first-person voice for his modern-day Odysseus: contemporary, brusque, full of military jargon and frequent, unflinching swearing. This narrative – depicting brutal violence, womanising and ambivalence about home – is intertwined with the gorgeous, poetic lyricism of Penelope's idealised, mythic account of her husband's exploits in Troy and on the seas, which she weaves into the eponymous web. Penelope's Web is an epic novel for our time, as appealing to readers who know nothing about ancient Greek literature as to scholars of the Odyssey and the Iliad. This re-imagining of Greek texts and classical mythology is a masterful, resonant study of war and peace that draws implicit parallels between contemporary military conflicts and the legendary battles of antiquity.