A reimagination of one of the most famous stories in all of literature — Achilles’s slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam’s attempt to ransom his son’s body in Homer’s The Iliad—Ransom is the first novel in more than a decade from David Malouf, arguably Australia’s greatest living writer. A novel of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom tells the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and Priam, king of Troy, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. Each man’s grief demands a confrontation with the other’s if it is to be resolved: a resolution more compelling to both than the demands of war. And when the aged father and the murderer of his son meet, “the past and present blend, enemies exchange places, hatred turns to understanding, youth pities age mourning youth.”Ransom is a tour de force, incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and in its unstated imperative to imagine our lives in light of fellow feeling.