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Book Cover for: The Odyssey, Homer

The Odyssey

Homer

By its evocation of a real or imaged heroic age, its contrasts of character and its variety of adventure, above all by its sheer narrative power, the Odyssey has won and preserved its place among the greatest tales in the world. It tells of Odysseus' adventurous wanderings as he returns from the long war at Troy to his home in the Greek island of Ithaca, where his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus have been waiting for him for twenty years. He meets a one-eyed giant, Polyphemus the Cyclops; he visits the underworld; he faces the terrible monsters Scylla and Charybdis; he extricates himself from the charms of Circe and Calypso. After these and numerous other legendary encounters he finally reaches home, where, disguised as a beggar, he begins to plan revenge on the suitors who have for years been besieging Penelope and feasting on his own meat and wine with insolent impunity.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Puffin Books
  • Publish Date: Dec 1st, 1997
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Revised - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.00in - 5.05in - 0.40in - 0.20lb
  • EAN: 9780140383096
  • Recommended age: 10-UP
  • Categories: Legends, Myths, Fables - Greek & RomanClassicsAction & Adventure - Survival Stories

About the Author

Geraldine McCaughrean has written over 160 other books, including A Little Lower Than Angels, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Children's Novel Award in 1987, A Pack of Lies, which won the Guardian Prize and Carnegie Medal in 1989 and Gold Dust, which won the Beefeater Children's Novel Award in 1994. She has written retellings of notoriously tricky classics including El Cid, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Moby Dick and The Pilgrim's Progress. In 2004, she won a competition to write the sequel to J M Barrie's Peter Pan. And in 2006, Peter Pan in Scarlet was published to great acclaim.

Praise for this book

"[Robert Fitzgerald's translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original." -The Nation

"[Fitzgerald's Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer's art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase." -The Yale Review

"[In] Robert Fitzgerald's translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world."
-from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney