Books that Shook the World / Homer's The Iliad and the Odyssey

Atlantic Books has achieved a publishing coup with its "Books that Shook the World" series... short biographies of great books, securing the best people to write them and ensuring that the remit to produce compendious, clear and engaged accounts. Each volume is a beautifully designed and produced B-format hardback. The stories of the Trojan war, Helen of Troy, Achilles, Petroclus, the Sirens and the Cyclops are embedded in western culture, yet readers often fail to recognise that they all spring from two sources, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." In this lyrical and graceful book, Alberto Manguel traces the lineage of these poems. Starting with their inception in ancient Greece and considering their place in the greatest literature ever created from the Rome of Virgil and Horace to Joyce's Dublin and Derek Walcott's Carribean, via Dante and Racine, this examination of Homer's "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" delights in the poems themselves and celebrates their presence throughout history. Alberto Manguel is an internationally acclaimed author. His book is a vigorous and timely analysis of Homer's seminal poetry