Paperback

Published: 1st March 2010
For Ages: 14 - 18 years old

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Booktopia Comments

Winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature and the ASAL Gold Medal Award.

Book Description

David Malouf shines new light on Homer's ILIAD, adding twists and reflections, as well as flashes of earthy humour, to surprise and enchant.

In this exquisite gem of a novel, Achilles is maddened by grief at the death of his friend Patroclus. From the walls of Troy, King Priam watches the body of his son, Hector, being dragged behind Achilles' chariot. There must be a way, he thinks, of reclaiming the body - of pitting compromise against heroics, new ways against the old, and of forcing the hand of fate. Dressed simply and in a cart pulled by a mule, an old man sets off for the Greek camp ...

Lyrical, immediate and heartbreaking Malouf's fable engraves the epic themes of the Trojan war onto a perfect miniature - themes of war and heroics, hubris and humanity, chance and fate, the bonds between soldiers, fathers and sons, all newly burnished and brilliantly recast for our times.

About The Author

David Malouf is the author of short story collections The Complete Stories (winner of the Australia Asia Literary Award), Dream Stuff ('These stories are pearls', - Spectator) and Every Move You Make and of acclaimed novels including The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers' and Miles Franklin Prizes) and Remembering Babylon (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). His most recent work Ransom was shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award and the Qld Premier's Literary Award and the Prime Minister's Literary Award. He also writes poetry, drama and libretti for operas. Born and brought up in Brisbane, he lives in Sydney.

'That this tender novel lingers so long and hauntingly in the mind is a testament both to Malouf's poetry and to his reverence for the endless power of myth.'
Steve Coates, New York Times Book Review

' ... profound ... subtle and extremely moving. Malouf's paraphrases of Homer are highly inventive, embroidered with imaginative details that often reanimate familiar elements of the epic. This is tampering at its very best.'
Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Yorker

'Australia's finest writer'
The Australian

'Though Malouf's sparingly deployed details, vigorous language, and sly wit humanize these tragic heroes, the story is unmistakably epic and certainly the stuff of legend.'
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'Ransom, his first novel in 10 years it must be said at once is a masterpiece, exquisitely written, pithy and wise and overwhelmingly moving, constructed with invisible, successful craft that leaves the reader wondering how in the world it had been done. ... fiction, in Malouf's hands, becomes the art of rendering the world coherent. For this we must be grateful.
Alberto Manguel, Australian Literary Review

'David Malouf writes with the voice of a poet: his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful. He has taken Homer's epic and given it fresh life in RANSOM. This is a book that will engage and inspire you.'
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'In austere, elegant prose that subverts Homer's Iliad in significant ways, David Malouf has created in Ransom an imaginative terrain that is both new and old.' Rod Jones, The Age

'A work of immediacy, humanity and tenderness.'
Philip Parker, Financial Times

'I thought I'd just dip back into Ransom and read a couple of pages. I didn't get out of there again. The way he caresses you, he just he caresses you and surprises you. It's still one of the great moments in writing in this country in the last 50 years. There's a moment in Ransom, where you just sit up and go, 'God! I can't.' I love surprise. I love surprise. And it has one of the great surprises in it.'
David Marr, First Tuesday Book Club

'The sheer potency of this slim volume can hijack your senses and emotions.' The Courier Mail

'This book shines new light on this story of the Trojan War, adding twists and reflections as well as flashes of earthly humour.' Brisbane News

'... lithe, graceful and deeply moving tale ... These pages of Ransom are nothing short of magical. Malouf’s prose is delicate, marvellously alert to the natural world and endowed with a quality that has one name only: wisdom. There is something Shakespearean about this section: not the Shakespeare of the great speeches but those quiet moments …when time stands still and the nature of life is mysteriously disclosed.'
Andrew Riemer, The Sydney Morning Herald

'Malouf’s rendering of Ancient Greece is gorgeous, fantastical, and yet earthly, humble and relatable.'
Australian Bookseller + Publisher

'RANSOM is a diamond of a novel, tiny but flawless, prose so pared away and carefully constructed that however many times you read it, it persists in revealing new meanings and unfolding new images to the mind’s eye.'
Sarah Bower, Editor’s Choice, HNR

'it’s a marvel - beautifully written, surprisingly moving, quietly rather brilliant.'
Harry Ritchie, The Daily Mail

'David Malouf has written a rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel, one to read, as it demands, in a sitting and then return to and read slowly.'
Alan Massie, The Scotsman

'the prose is consistently fine. Malouf is incapable of an ugly sentence. The style is so sure, so unostentatious, that we can overlook how good it is ..'
Peter Rose, ABR

'By the time Nikos Kazantzakis completed his sequel to The Odyssey, in 1938, The Iliad had shown itself to be better suited to our imperilled, capsizing world. The twentieth century's wars were fought under the sign of Homer's epic. Rupert Brooke recited The Iliad on the troopship to Gallipoli, and ecstatically anticipated a death that would eternalise his name ... Now David Malouf's meditation on one small episode from The Iliad in his novel Ransom gives the epic a renewed relevance.'
Peter Conrad, the Monthly

'David Malouf, one of Australia's most admired writers, has taken a sliver of Homer's ILIAD and augmented and embellished it. The result is a beautiful tale that acknowledges its place as a fragment in a larger narrative yet stands alone.'
Nina Caplan, Time Out

'David Malouf's retelling of the final chapters of Homer’s ILIAD stands alone as a magnificent tribute to the poetic strength of its tumultuous source and a quietly poignant critique on the futility of war. This is a great story in its own right ... But Malouf’s beautiful language puts fresh flesh on to these characters.'
Claire Allfree, Metro

'... a work of immediacy, humanity and tenderness. Malouf succeeds beautifully in transporting the reader into the world and thought patterns of archaic Greece and then in part subverting them. His elegant prose is delightful.'
Philip Parker, Financial Times

'David Malouf has written a rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel, one to read, as it demands, in a sitting and then to return adn read it slowly.'
Allan Massie, The Scotsman

'The themes of this apparently simple, yet immensely moving, modern novel are still vast: loss, forgiveness, love and redemption. Lyrical, witty, gentle, this is above all a story of transformation.'
Elizabeth Speller, The Independent

'David Malouf writes with the voice of a poet; his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful. RANSOM is a dignified performance. Here is fiction as art, epic re-imagined as a simple tale of a father fulfiling his duty. Serious questions are raised: honour, grief, retribution, mortality. In writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making it his own.'
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

'David Malouf’s RANSOM [is] a wonderful retelling of the encounter between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam in prose that’s so good you want to eat it.'
Mariella Frostrup, The Guardian

Just a short email to tell you how much I enjoyed 'Ransom' by Malouf. The blurb on the back of the book said something about finishing the short novel and then immediately starting it again, which is exactly what I did.
The language and imagery is just wonderful – I loved it. If we have a greater writer in Australia, I don’t know who it is!
Talk to you soon, and again, thanks for the reading copy.
Lyn, Coaldrake’s Bookshop

'. . .I have been lucky enough to read an advance copy of David Malouf’s first novel in more than 10 years, Ransom (due in April) – a powerful, visceral and haunting revisiting of Hector's Troy. It's a thrilling reworking of a classic subject.'
David Gaunt, Gleebooks

ISBN: 9781741669657
ISBN-10: 1741669650
Audience: General
For Ages: 14 - 18 years old
For Grades: 10 - 12
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 240
Published: 1st March 2010
Publisher: Random House Australia
Dimensions (cm): 19.8 x 13.0  x 1.9
Weight (kg): 0.25