Achilles - by Elizabeth Cook (Paperback)

About the Book

This powerful, passionate and beautifully crafted retelling of the epic tale of "Achilles" recreates Homer's fated hero in a new and striking reality. An unforgettable and deeply moving work of fiction, "Achilles" is also an affirmation of the story's enduring power to reach across centuries and cultures to the core of imagination.

Book Synopsis

Born of god and king and hidden as a girl until Odysseus discovers him, Achilles becomes the Greeks' greatest warrior at Troy. Into his story comes a cast of fascinating characters--among them Hector, Helen, Penthiselaia the Amazon Queen, and the centaur Chiron; and finally John Keats, whose writings form the basis of a meditation on the nature of identity and shared experience. Achilles is an affirmation of the story's enduring power to reach across centuries and cultures to the core of our imagination.

Review Quotes

"This book is a tiny treasure....If, as they say, every generation demands its own translation of Homer, Cook brings us here a Homer for the MTV generation." --Slate.com

"Everything in this novel, except the number of pages, is larger than life, and in reading it we are returned to our own lives with a sense of larger possibility. This bright, fierce book reminds us that, however grievous, however inevitable our losses, we do not bear them alone." --Boston Sunday Globe

"This forceful re-creation of the life of Achilles sacrifices nothing to modernity....At the same time, this brief, intense novel is unmistakably modern in intent.... Fragments of keen, almost carnal prose have the cumulative effect of a requiem." --The New Yorker

"[A] poetic masterpiece, a psychologically acute portrait... Achilles is also unfailingly modern: swift, cinematic, sexually explicit, and ravishingly beautiful." --The Atlantic Monthly

About the Author

Elizabeth Cook has published short fiction and poetry, as well as scholarly works on Renaissance literature. She has also written for television and the theater. She lives in London. Achilles is her first novel.