Glorious Exploits

Shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year 2024
Waterstones Fiction Book of the Month for August 2024
Shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Awards 2024
Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2024
Shortlisted for the Nero Debut Fiction Award 2024

An exhilarating, fiercely original story of brotherhood, war and art, and of daring to dream of something bigger than ourselves.

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected, and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

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 ...