Synopsis

"No mortal more beautiful than she will be born," prophesies Zeus, in the guise of the swan who impregnates Leda; and so, with the birth of Helen the Resplendent, begins this novel that encompasses the entire so-called "Trojan Cycle." Stories that come from afar, from ancient theogonies and myths that sing the shared destiny of gods and men, to narrate a dark and blinding parable: the passage from the Golden Age to the Iron Age, the end of the age of heroes. Stories that intertwine precisely by virtue of Helen's beauty, the most desired, the most contested, and the most elusive. But Cesare Sinatti does not simply re-enact myths; he distances the gods and weakens their control over individual destinies, intertwining the modes of epic and tragedy (ancient and modern, from Euripides to Shakespeare), forcefully bringing to the stage the humanity of the protagonists' feelings and passions. Removed from the fixity of myth, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles and Patroclus, but also Epipola, Clytemnestra, Penelope and many others, emerge from these pages with extreme clarity…