Glorious Exploits

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I loved this book. Fierce, funny, fast-paced. Glorious Exploits brings the ancient world roaring to life in a brilliantly non-stuffy way—as if the figures on a Greek vase turned round, offered you wine, and started chatting. Thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally brutal, and shot through with insight, pathos and hope. Reminiscent of Kevin Barry and George Saunders, but wholly original—an unforgettable debut." He continued whispering to his dog. Kissing it and rubbing away the blood with the sleeve of his coat. Watching I felt strangely jealous, and I believe that if in that moment I was offered the opportunity to change places with the dog, I would have. For the second time in my life I touched the man’s head, but he moved away and only cried the more. Amazingly, the idea is rooted in historical record; Plutarch’s Lives references how some Athenian prisoners survived by quoting Euripides to the poetry-loving Sicilians. For Lennon, this discovery transformed a large-scale war of conquest into a personal story, and he set out to investigate the contradiction between the dehumanisation of the prisoners and the obsession with their drama, and to imagine how that empathy gap might have been bridged.

The vanquished Athenians are being held captive in Syracusan quarries. Lampo’s best friend, Gelon, is “mad for” the Athenian tragedian Euripides, and the pair offer the starving prisoners sustenance in exchange for recitations from his plays. They then cast them in their own productions of “Medea” and “The Trojan Women”. An exhilarating, fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art, and of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves. I nearly cried on the tube reading it on my tiny phone, I could imagine scenes in the climax as clearly as if they were played on a movie screen in front of me. You will not know until you read it what the desperation of that hill and that fence in the night felt like. It felt vivid and real! And that is such a rarity.

Fig Tree publishing director Helen Garnons-Williams said: “Reading Ferdia’s novel for the first time felt like a jolt of electricity. It’s an extraordinary achievement and we are incredibly excited to be publishing it at Fig Tree. His writing is bold and beautifully crafted, darkly funny, thrilling, and profoundly affecting. Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable novel about brotherhood and war, beauty and violence and about our collective urge to tell stories and make art even in the direst of circumstances and the darkest of times.” Water and cheese,” says Gelon, “for anyone who knows lines of Euripides and can recite them! If it’s from Medea or Telephus you’ll get olives too.” The story itself: a tale of overcoming differences, the power of art and love, brotherhood, romance, war, quests, victory, defeat, heartbreak, Glorious Exploits honestly had it all. It was both an epic and a tragedy and a comedy. The plot of the novel nearly mirrored the plays put on by the characters inside it. It was fully fledged and magnificent.

What an absolute blinder of a book! Glorious Exploits is a refreshingly unique take on the current trend for novels set in Ancient Greece. It chooses a bold historical setting: the aftermath of Athen’s most infamous disaster, the Sicilian expedition, where thousands of Athenians lost their lives and several thousand were imprisoned in stone quarries near Syracuse. And in this grim war-ravaged setting it creates a story both laugh-out-loud funny and brutal: we follow Syracusan Lampo as he and his pal Gelon attempt to stage two plays by Euripides (Medea and Trojan Women). The catch? Well, Lampo and Gelon are but lowly unemployed potters, fond of the drink. And they’ve decided the only proper way to stage Euripides is with an Athenian cast.. This book is delightful and original. It's genuinely one of the best I've read this year. It's written beautifully, with a narration in a contemporary Irish vernacular that brings an element of humor and makes the story feel modern and relatable. It's dark, deeply funny, with glimpses of hope scattered throughout. It's also very readable, I burned through it in two days because the story really immersed me and I wanted to see what happened next. I thought it was well paced and had a satisfying ending.

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They would share their thoughts on the individual explorers, some hugely famous and others relatively unknown, and one day Bradley admitted to the group: “By the way, my favourite is this guy that no-one cares about, Graham Gore, he’s not in any books, he’s not really in the archives, but I love him.” The “bridge” and Graham Gore move into a safehouse somewhere in London, where she begins the delicate process of assimilation, bringing him up to speed with developments since the Victorian age. Bradley, whose “all-time favourite writer” is Terry Pratchett, mines a rich source of comedy with this fish-out-of-water side to the charming, chain-smoking Gore. The “bridge” maintains a professional distance to begin with, but the sexual tension between the two builds slowly and inexorably. I know what you must think and I . . . stop it Captain, I’m sorry, he’s . . . I know what you must think of me. I’m . . . Captain!’ Sorry, I knew more, but I can’t seem to … My head, it’s broken, see, I forget faces, and I can’t remember my … I swear I knew more.”

Bradley has no plans to give up the publishing day job, preferring to write in the evenings after work.

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Sure they are broke, their potential actors are despised, hated and dying, they have no theatre experience or scripts, but when the duo find an actual actor and realise that thanks to him, they can put on not just Medea but also Euripedes new play The Trojan Women, a work not yet seen or heard in Syracuse, the dream takes on a life of its own. To the modern reader, ancient Syracusan society is a mass of contradictions, “oddly relatable yet completely different”: a democracy in which only male citizens can vote, intellectually curious yet deeply religious, cultured yet militaristic. An undercurrent of loss thrums beneath the bustle, capturing that sense of “violence being quite close to the surface of the lived experience”. Fear not,” says I. “We come not to punish, though you Athenian dogs deserve punishment. Gelon and I are merciful. We come—” Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adores Athenian poetry, especially the work of Euripedes. Which is why he has a brainwave. Why don't they put on a play right here, in the quarry, a Greek Tragedy performed by actual Athenians? But as the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. As the performance draws near, the men will find their courage tested in ways they could never have imagined ...