"The ancient world feels new again in Terence Hawkins' The Rage of Achilles, a raw, idiomatic retelling of the Iliad with a searching assay of human consciousness. Unique and invigorating."
—Louis Bayard, author of The Pale Blue Eye
“We know what will happen to Achilles, and it can't change: but through Hawkins' eyes and ears, the story will be new and grippingly real to readers of this age."
—John Crowley, World Fantasy Award Winner and author of Little, Big
“Hawkins’ tale moves with the force of a cyclone.”
In The Rage of Achilles, Terence Hawkins recounts the Iliad as a novel and imagines a Trojan War that really happened. Though he adopts Homer's characters, those fabled warriors are no more noble than the grunts they command, exhausted and bitter after ten years of brutal Bronze Age warfare. And however savage the fighting, over all hangs the terrible truth that the objective of combat is not glory, but the enslavement of the defeated.
Told in taut, elegant prose that captures both the Homeric lyric and military grit, The Rage of Achilles is a fast-moving take on literature's foundational epic.