'Witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive. A supple, lyrical voice that captures the spirit of the original Odyssey and at the same time feels freshly contemporary.a stunning and hypnotic novel' New York TimesAfter ten years#x19; 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#x19;s linear narrative and explodes it: presenting alternative and contradictory fragments of familiar stories #x13; the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops Circe, 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.'In his versions of these ancient myths Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself' Simon Armitage'Mason allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths&Mason delights in doubles, spirals, conceptual mazes and Moebius strips&he is a wondrous pleasure to read' Los Angeles Times'A subtle, inventive and moving meditation on the nature of story and what Louis MacNeice calls "the drunkenness of things being various"' John Banville'Mason offers the reader a book of intellectual fireworks that also manages to be wonderfully entertaining' Sunday Times.