'An instant classic, I have never read anything like it. Cook retells Achilles' story, making the reader feel that it exists in a present tense. Her writing is charged: every moment matters, each word counts, as if time were running out. It is as if the writing itself were a heroic enterprise...a terrifying, erotic tour de force'

'Extraordinary, and extraordinarily successful ... what the late Angela Carter did for the folk-tale or fairy-story, Cook is here doing for the classical epic'

'A masterful retelling of the myth – a short, intense account of a short, intense life, closer to being a poem than a novel; if not verse, then at least prose with blood pressure'

'It is of such a soaring, seductive quality that it makes you wonder why human beings ever do anything with their free time but sit in circles, telling great stories ... A shining experience, not to be forgotten'

'A remarkable renewal of the tales of the ancient hero... A prose poem with the sensuous commitment of Christopher Logue, it also has something of the intellectuality, and indeed the layered allusiveness, of Thomas Mann'