The Odyssey: A Lost Retelling by Einar Thalkin

No manuscript of this telling has ever been found. Here is the whole of Homer's Odyssey told anew. All twenty-four books, from the council of the gods to the last peace sworn on Ithaca, in a voice at once ancient and startlingly clear. Odysseus wakes on Calypso's shore with his life running out of him through his eyes. A son sets out to become a man. A wife holds a kingdom together by cunning and delay. And across the wine-dark sea, one long-suffering wanderer turns his heart toward home. This is not a translation, and not a summary. It is a retelling: the entire epic reimagined in luminous prose, with the gods, the prophecies, and the doom rising into measured verse. The human world breathes in plain language. Fate speaks in meter. The result reads like a manuscript recovered from an older world, by turns grave, humane, funny, and terrible. For readers who love myth told with both fidelity and fire, A Lost Retelling restores the Odyssey's earthiness and its terror at once: the hunger of the suitors, the patience of a swineherd, the cold intelligence of Penelope, the bright cruelty of the gods. The oldest story of homecoming, told as if for the first time. Read more