Ackroyd's brilliant historical novel is replete with secrets and intrigue, mystical and extreme incidents. The events unfolding at the excavations of ancient Troy are not inferior in intensity to the exciting episodes of Homer's Iliad. Boldly combining fact and fiction, the author creates a vivid image of an ambitious fanatic archaeologist with a dark past and an exciting present. Heinrich Obermann is a literary double of the famous “discoverer of Troy” Heinrich Schliemann. As befits an adventurer of global scale, his past includes a mysterious marriage with a Russian woman and unclean transactions in the golden sands of California, and in the present there are no less large-scale adventures, immoderate ambitions and a young wife - the heir to the ancient culture that captured Obermann’s soul. During the excavations of the legendary city, real artifacts and fakes mix, chilling the blood of history and skillful lies, the intensity of human passions is resolved by the riot of natural elements, sweeping away traces of the past and the present, fictional and real.