Suitors

This book is a fresh, frenzied re-imagining of "The Odyssey" - and the debut of a major new literary talent. Very, very loosely based on "The Odyssey", "The Suitors" is a wildly inventive, painstakingly crafted little novel. Focusing less on the Odysseus character (renamed Payne) than on the Penelope character (now Penny), it follows the eyebrow-raising exploits of her much-maligned, ill-fated suitors. While Payne gallivants around, waging war and otherwise taking his time on the voyage home, Penny - stunning in her beauty while forever sullen in demeanour - finds herself surrounded by a motley crew ne'er-do-wells eager for nothing but her attention. She, however, cannot be bothered with anything but her memories of Payne. That is, until the mysterious arrival of a man whose origins no-one on the scene can quite divine. When Penny starts taking a shine to him, the tenuous calm on the home-front quickly starts to unravel. Set in an unforgettable landscape that is not quite suburban America but is nowhere else either, and at a time that is not quite now but neither the past nor the future still, the result is an exuberantly imaginative meditation on love and exile, memory and desire, violence and betrayal, and last but not least, compassion. Full of ideas but with never a dull moment, "The Suitors" heralds the debut of a major new literary talent.