The Return from Troy

After ten years of war Troy has fallen, yet even as they divide the spoils, quarrels break out among the victorious Argives. Soon it seems that even their gods have turned against them, and when they take to their ships they discover that their ordeals have only just begun.Fulfilling a promise to Odysseus, Phemius, Bard of Ithaca, tells the story of the warlords' fateful return from the war at Troy. With Cassandra at his side and the treasure of Troy in his hold, Agamemnon sails back to Mycenae, where his wife Clytaemnestra has long nursed a vengeful fury over his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenaia. Meanwhile his brother Menelaus must decide the fate of Helen, over whose incomparable beauty the war was fought.But this is primarily a novel about Odysseus, a man so traumatized by the slaughter his own ingenuity has unleashed that he no longer believes himself fit to return to his wife and son. Driven both by tempests and by his own torment, he embarks on a voyage which will take him out to the margins of the world and deep into the shadows of his own heart before a mysterious sequence of initiations frees him to make the hopeful journey home.Whitbread Award-winning novelist Lindsay Clarke brings to bear his trademark lyricism, lucidity and mythic power in a novel which offers a unique and tellingly contemporary interpretation of one of the world's great stories.