Myths series

Penelope. Immortalised in legend and myth as the devoted wife of the glorious Odysseus, silently weaving and unpicking and weaving again as she waits for her husband's return. Now Penelope wanders the underworld, spinning a different kind of thread: her own side of the story - a tale of lust, greed and murder.

In a retelling of an ancient Celtic myth about Angus, the god of love, youth, and beauty and a trickster who turns one's romantic dreams upside down, five young men named Angus parallel the god's story as they search for true love.

From one of Israel's most lauded contemporary writers, this book retells the myth of Samson-one of the most tempestuous, charismatic, and colorful characters in the Hebrew Bible. Few other Bible stories feature as much drama and action, narrative fireworks and raw emotion: the battle with the lion; the three hundred burning foxes; the women he bedded and the one woman that he loved; his betrayal by all the women in his life, from his mother to Delilah;...

Michel Faber's The Fire Gospel is a wickedly funny, acid-tongued, media-savvy picaresque that delves into our sensationalist culture. Theo Griepenkerl, a Canadian linguistics scholar, is sent to Iraq in search of artifacts that have survived the destruction and looting of the war. While visiting a museum in Mosul, he finds nine papyrus scrolls tucked in the belly of a bas-relief sculpture: they have been perfectly preserved for more than two thousand...

The author of The Cleaner of Chartres "brings Sigmund Freud together with a vivid, loquacious Tiresias for an intriguing retelling of the Oedipus myth" (Publishers Weekly). In the latest retelling of the world's greatest stories in the Myth series from Canongate, the highly regarded novelist Salley Vickers brings to life the Western world's most widely known myth, Oedipus, through a shrewdly told exploration of the seminal story in conversation between...

According to Slavic myth, Baba Yaga is a witch who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. In Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, internationally acclaimed writer Dubravka Ugresic takes the timeless legend and spins it into a fresh and distinctly modern tale of femininity, aging, identity, and love. With barbed wisdom and razor-sharp wit, Ugresic weaves together the stories of four women in contemporary Eastern Europe: a writer who grants...

This reimagining of the Amazon’s greatest legend by the prize-winning Brazilian author of The Brothers “does what every good telling of a myth should” (Financial Times).
The setting for this fable is Eldorado, the Enchanted city that inhabited the fevered dreams of European navigators and conquistadors, but eluded all attempts to find it on the map. Some have linked it to Manaus, Brazil’s capitol

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In a place like no other, on a mystical island in the shape of tear drop, two sisters are born into a family of oracles. Beautiful Kamikuu is admired far and wide; Namima, small but headstrong, learns to live in her older sister's shadow. On her sixth birthday, Kamikuu is chosen as the next Oracle, while Namima is forced to become the goddess of darkness, destined to spend eternity guiding the spirits of the deceased to the underworld. As the sisters...