The Odyssey isn't merely the story of one man's long journey home. It's the template for every homecoming story ever told, the original map of what it means to leave, suffer, change, and return transformed. Composed nearly three thousand years ago in ancient Greece, this epic follows Odysseus through ten years of impossible trials: monsters, sorceresses, the wrath of gods, the loneliness of an endless sea, as he fights to reclaim his kingdom, his wife, his place in the world. He has been gone twenty years. Ten at Troy. Ten more lost on wines-dark seas, trapped by a nymph who wants him to be her husband, tossed by tempests, blinded by cyclops, held by underworld shades. Meanwhile, on Ithaca, suitors devour his estate and pressure his wife Penelope to remarry. His son Telemachus must grow into a man without a father. The gods debate his fate while mortals act. This is a poem about the endurance of the human spirit against overwhelming odds, about cunning surviving where brute force fails, about the bonds that hold us to our truest selves when the world tries to remake us. Fagles' translation captures that ancient music in a contemporary voice. Three thousand years later, it remains the definitive account of what it costs to return home.
