The Myths

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Canongate — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:04:35 +0000

You can also read Philip Pullman’s introduction to the first Myths boxset on this site.

This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories.

This book is available in hardback with two different covers, audiobook editions and an enhanced ebook.

Find out more on www.thegoodmanjesusandthescoundrelchrist.co.uk.

Philip Pullman was born in Norwich, England in 1946 and grew up in Zimbabwe and Wales. He worked as a teacher for many years and his first children’s novel, Count Karlstein, came out in 1982. The Ruby in the Smoke, the first of the Sally Lockhart quartet of Victorian thrillers, was published in 1985. He has won many awards, including the Carnegie Medal, the Guardian Children’s Book Award, the Smarties Prize, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and a CBE. His acclaimed trilogy, His Dark Materials, has been published in 39 languages, and was the subject of a hugely successful adaptation at the National Theatre in 2003-4 and 2004-5. Once Upon a Time in the North was published in April 2008. Philip Pullman lives in Oxford with his wife, and has two sons.

Photo by Wolf Marloh.

Orphans of Eldorado

Canongate — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:50:50 +0000

‘With his erudition and marshalling of historical detail. Hatoum compressed an epic into a novella.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Clear in each particular but tantalisingly elusive in its overall meaning, Orphans of Eldorado does what every good telling of a myth should.’ Financial Times

The setting for this magical 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 in the Amazon Basin, and it is here that Arminto Cordovil lives with his father Amando in a white mansion. Orphans of Eldorado is a rich and magical fable that beautifully captures the atmosphere of the steamy, lush Amazonian world.

Born in Manaus in 1952, Milton Hatoum’s first novel, Tale of a Certain Orient, was published in 1989, followed by The Brothers in 2000. Both won the prestigious Jabuti Prize for best novel. Ashes of the Amazon (2005) was also awarded the Jabuti Prize, as well as the Portugal Telecom Prize for literature.

The Hurricane Party

Canongate — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:55:49 +0000

[The Hurricane Party is] an ambitious and fully fleshed-out entry in the Myths series. The Herald

An exhilarating adventure that races through times, places and ideas. Metro

A courageous blend of sci fi, crime fiction and mythology, of genre sensibility and literary style. Sunday Business Post

Hanck Orn’s son is dead. When they come to the door they tell him it was a heart attack, but he knows they are lying. So he travels to the outermost reaches of the land to find out what really happened. When he lands on the island he is met by a young woman, hair streaked with blood, raving like a lunatic. She is one of the sisters, who tell him the story of how his son died in the great hall of the Clan, the Norse gods, who were holding a party. But the festivities soon got out of hand, the guests began to argue with one another, and the mischievous shapeshifter Loki dealt a deadly blow.

Set in a dystopian future that recalls Orwell and Zamyatin, Klas Östergren has weaved a dizzying story of magnificent scope and foul play. Moving from the golden halls to the depths of the underworld, it is about one man’s search for justice for his son in a world on the brink. A place where true love is so strong it can bring about the end of time.

Klas Östergren was born in Stockholm in 1955 and is the author of several novels including the landmark Gentlemen (1981) and its sequel, Gangsters (2005). A leading star of Swedish literature for nearly three decades, he has won the Piratenpriset and the Doblougska prize from the Swedish Academy. A founder of the rock band Fullersta Revolutionary Orchestra, Östergren has also worked as a translator, playwright, and scriptwriter for television and screen, and he co-wrote Mikael Håfström’s film Ondskan, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. He now lives with his wife and three children in the seafront town of Kivik in southern Sweden.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

Canongate — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 12:12:58 +0000

Blisteringly postmodern in its execution but at its heart is a human warmth and even a silliness that infuses it with the sweet magic of storytelling. The Times

A book packed with intellectual surprises and emotional revelations. Metro

Baba Yaga is a witch-like character who flies around on a giant mortar, kidnapping (and presumably eating) small children. She lives in a house on chicken feet. She is generally a terrifying figure, portrayed not only in literature but also film, animation and music throughout Russian culture.

Dubravka Ugrešić takes the story of Baba Yaga and weaves it into something completely fresh. The result is an extraordinary meditation on femininity, ageing, identity, secrets, storytelling and love.

Dubravka Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Croatia. She worked for twenty years at the Institute for Theory of Literature at Zagreb University, successfully pursuing parallel careers as a writer and a literary scholar.

She started writing professionally with screenplays for children’s television programs, as an undergraduate. In 1971 she published her first book for children, which was awarded a prestigious Croatian literary prize for children’s literature.

In 1991, when the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and consequently an anti-war stand. She started to write critically about nationalism (both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of the nationalistically charged media. She was proclaimed a ‘traitor’, a ‘public enemy’ and a ‘witch’, ostracised and exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. She left Croatia in 1993.

Dubravka Ugrešić has continued writing since she began living abroad. She has published both novels and books of essays. Ugrešić’s essays have appeared in American (Context, The Hedgehog Review) and European newspapers and magazines (Vrij Nederland, Die Zeit, Die Welt Woche and many others). She teaches occasionally at American and European universities. Her books have been translated into more then twenty languages and she has received several major European literary awards. She is now based in Amsterdam and works as a freelance writer.

Michel Faber on the Guardian

Canongate — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:37:06 +0000

A very reluctant preacher – profile of Michel Faber on guardian.co.uk

The Fire Gospel

Canongate — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:38:09 +0000

A pacy book-world satire. Naomi West, Harper’s Bazaar

A majestic, horrific thriller of a story. The Times

A really enjoyable piece of work. Simon Appleby, bookgeeks.co.uk

… it’s definitely proof that one of our most entertaining and original authors has risen again. The List

Theo Griepenkerl is a modest academic with an Olympian ego. When he visits a looted museum in Iraq, looking for treasures he can ship back to Canada, he finds nine papyrus scrolls that have lain hidden for two thousand years. Once translated from Aramaic, these prove to be a fifth Gospel, written by an eye-witness of Jesus Christ’s last days. But when Theo decides to share this sensational discovery with the world, he fails to imagine the impact the new Gospel will have on Christians, Arabs, homicidal maniacs and Amazon customers. Like Prometheus’s gift of fire, it has incendiary consequences.

Michel Faber has written seven other books, including the highly acclaimed The Crimson Petal and the White, The Fahrenheit Twins and the Whitbread-shortlisted novel Under the Skin. The Apple, based on characters in The Crimson Petal and the White, was published in 2006. He has also written two novellas, The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (2001) and The Courage Consort (2002), and has won several short-story awards, including the Neil Gunn, Ian St James and Macallan..

Girl Meets Boy wins Diva Book Of The Year

Canongate — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:41:33 +0000

Girl Meets Boy has won Diva Magazine readers’ choice for Book of the Year. Congratulations, Ali!

Binu and the Great Wall

Canongate — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:34:57 +0000

“… in its own curious way, is a wonderful read – with all of a fairy tale’s leaps and turns and queer, vivid images…rich as a piece of brocade, by turns violent and forgiving, harsh and tender” Kirsty Gunn, Observer

“The painterly quality of Tong’s words is striking” Bettany Hughes, The Times

“A gripping, insightful depiction of the lives of commoners under the Qin Dynasty…A tragic tale of female strength, and, ultimately, love” Katie Samuel, Time Out

In Peach village, crying is forbidden. But as a child, Binu never learnt to hide her tears. Shunned by the villagers, she faced a bleak future, until she met Qiliang, an orphan who offered her his hand in marriage.

Then one day Qiliang disappears. Binu learns that he has been transported hundreds of miles and forced to labour on a project of terrifying ambition and scale — the building of the Great Wall.

Binu is determined to find and save her husband. Inspired by her love, she sets out on an extraordinary journey towards Great Swallow mountain, with only a blind frog for company. What follows is an unforgettable story of passion, hardship and magical adventure.

Su Tong is the author of the highly acclaimed Raise the Red Lantern and My Life As Emperor. He was born and lives in China.

Girl Meets Boy

Canongate — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:26:57 +0000

“…Girl Meets Boy is rewriting – and then some. A glorious wide-awake dream of a book that has, right at its beating heart, one of Ovid’s Metamorphoses…By the time I finished the book, my heart was beating and tears stood in my eyes, even as I had the biggest smile written all over my face…” Kirsty Gunn, Observer

“Ali Smith has delivered another exuberant cascade of words” Molly Guinness, Spectator

“Ali Smith, with humour and typical linguistic versatility, explores issues of homophobia, corporate and social responsibility and the sheer vertiginous feeling of falling in love…A delicate tale with a solid message of conscientious objection at its heart” Catherine Taylor, Independent on Sunday

Girl meets boy. It’s a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances?

Ali Smith’s re-mix of Ovid’s most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can’t be bottled and sold.

It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations.

Funny and fresh, poetic and political, Girl meets boy is a myth of metamorphosis for the modern world.

Ali Smith’s first book, Free Love, won the Saltire First Book Award. She is also the author of Like (1997); Other Stories And Other Stories (1999); Hotel World (2001), which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize, and won the Encore Award; The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) and The Accidental (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.

Where Three Roads Meet

Canongate — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 16:18:40 +0000

“… Vickers knows her Hellenic stuff, and she conjures the long-dried fount of western civilisation with eerie reality. The novel is a bright, hard, fine-cut gem” Hugo Barnacle, Sunday Times

“Myths invite speculation, provoke enquiry and thought. Freud knew this, which is why they fascinated him. Salley Vickers knows it too, and in this novella she has given another twist to the stories of Oedipus and of Freud. The great investigator of the sub-conscious gas becomes a mythical figure himself. This is a book to dwell on, to ponder, and delight in” Alan Massie, Scotsman

“I am speechless with admiration.” John Julius Norwich

“She’s a presence worth cherishing in the ranks of modern novelists.” Philip Pullman

It is 1938 and Sigmund Freud, suffering from the debilitating effects of cancer, has been permitted by the Nazis to leave Vienna. He seeks refuge in England, taking up residence in the house in Hampstead in which he will die only fifteen months later. But his last months are made vivid by the arrival of a stranger, who comes and goes according to Freud’s state of health. Who is the mysterious visitor and why has he come to tell the famed proponent of the Oedipus complex his strange story?

Set partly in pre-war London and partly in Ancient Greece, Where Three Roads Meet is as brilliantly compelling as it is moving. Former psychoanalyst and acclaimed novelist Salley Vickers revisits a crime committed long ago which still has disturbing reverberations for us all.

As well as being an acclaimed author, Salley Vickers is a trained analytical psychologist and lectures widely on the connections between literature, psychology and religion. She lives and works in London and Bath.