'It will be read and re-read not as a treatise but as a story: one of the most extraordinary that has ever been written of the origins of Western self-consciousness' Simon Schama

The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony was the last time the gods of Olympus feasted alongside mortals. What happened in the distant ages preceding it, and in the generations that followed, form the timeless tales of ancient Greek mythology. In this masterful retelling of the myths we think we know, Roberto Calasso illuminates the deepest questions of our existence.

'The kind of book one comes across only once or twice in one's lifetime' Joseph Brodsky

'A perfect work like no other' Gore Vidal

Our Booksellers Say...

"This might be the book I would choose to keep if a future government said that all the books in our homes had to be destroyed apart from one. Not only is this novel an astonishing gallop through virtually the entire canon of Greek mythology, it is also an enduring testament to the human spirit, not to mention a work which performs the most jaw-dropping somersaults with language and the structure of the novel. Almost every other work of art cannot touch it."

Zool Verjee, Bookseller at Blackwell's Broad Street, Oxford