The Lost Books of the Odyssey. by Zachary Mason

After ten years' journeying Odysseus returns, again and again, to Ithaca. Each time he finds something different: his patient wife Penelope has betrayed him and married; his arrival accelerates time and he watches his family age and die in front of him; he walks into an empty house in ruins; he returns but is so bored he sets sail again to repeat his voyage; he comes back to find Penelope is dead. In these forty-four retellings of passages from Homer's "Odyssey," Zachary Mason uses Homer's linear narrative and explodes it: presenting alternative and contradictory fragments of familiar stories - "The Trojan Horse," "The Cyclops Circe," and "The Sirens" - allowing us to see Homer's masterpiece afresh. Elegant, provocative and utterly fascinating, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey" seems destined to become a modern classic.