Among the oldest adventure stories still told, Homer’s Odyssey – rendered here in prose – follows Odysseus, hero-king of Ithaca, through ten years of trial on his long voyage home from the Trojan War.
Price range: £7.99 through £26.99
Price range: £7.99 through £26.99
| Author |
Homer |
|---|---|
| Imprint |
Wine Dark Press |
| Categories |
Fairy Tales, Myths & Legends Historical Fiction Sagas Fiction |
| ISBN | 9781528719766, 9781528770262, 9781528792790 |
| Formats Available | |
| Pages | 382, 380 |
| Publication Date | 25 October 2021, 20 October 2021 |
| Weight | 1.07 kg |
| Dimensions | 5.5 × 8.5 in |
Among the oldest adventure stories still told, Homer’s Odyssey – rendered here in prose – follows Odysseus, hero-king of Ithaca, through ten years of trial on his long voyage home from the Trojan War.
Troy has fallen, and the other Greek kings have sailed for home, but Odysseus is kept from his. His return will take as long as the war itself, ten years across the wine-dark sea, and it will cost the lives of every man who sails with him. And home, in Ithaca, has its own siege. Believing her husband dead, the faithful Penelope holds off a hall of suitors who feast on his estate and press her to choose a new king. The long voyage and the longer wait draw together toward a homecoming and a reckoning that has shaped the way stories end ever since.
Rendered into flowing English prose by the novelist Samuel Butler in 1900, this translation carries the poem’s influence – felt across centuries of art, literature, and film – to readers beyond the verse tradition. Wine Dark Press is proud to present this foundational epic of Western storytelling in an edition faithful to its original source material, gathered with a selection of essays and writings on Homer and his work: the original voyage set down whole, to stand on the shelf beside the stories it inspired.
Here Homer’s epic tale of Odysseus is given in Samuel Butler’s 1900 prose, a clear and flowing English that carries the voyage forward without the barrier of archaic verse. Sitting at the centre of Wine Dark Press, we have set the story alongside a selection of essays and writings on Homer, so the reader holds both the original writing and the long conversation around it. Designed or the lifelong classicist and the first-time reader alike – a legacy edition to return to for a lifetime.
Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902), better known as the novelist behind Erewhon, was convinced that the Odyssey had been composed not by the poet of the Iliad but by a young woman of Sicily – a theory he set out in The Authoress of the Odyssey in 1897 and carried into the introduction and notes of this prose version. Whatever one makes of the argument, Butler’s plain, novelistic English has remained in print and in use for more than a century.
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Price range: £7.99 through £26.99
Among the oldest adventure stories still told, Homer’s Odyssey – rendered here in prose – follows Odysseus, hero-king of Ithaca, through ten years of trial on his long voyage home from the Trojan War.
