Monsters, gods, and twenty years between a man and home.

Homer's The Odyssey is the first great adventure story in Western literature—and still the best. After ten years fighting at Troy, the cunning hero Odysseus just wants to get home to his wife and son in Ithaca. It takes another ten years. What follows is an epic journey through a world of vengeful gods, man-eating monsters, seductive goddesses, and seas that want him dead. Odysseus faces the Cyclops, resists the Sirens' song, navigates between Scylla and Charybdis, loses all his men, and washes up alone on strange shores again and again. But the real battle waits at home: his palace overrun by suitors devouring his wealth and pressuring his wife Penelope to remarry, his son Telemachus struggling to become a man without his father, and Odysseus himself needing to reclaim his kingdom through cunning and violence. Homer's epic is a story about war's aftermath and the cost of survival, about what home means after decades away, about marriage tested by time and distance, about fathers and sons, and about whether the man who returns is still the man who left. Composed nearly three millennia ago and passed down through oral tradition before being written, this ancient poem remains thrillingly immediate, a tale of resilience, identity, and the brutal, beautiful struggle to return to the life you lost.

About the author

Homer is the legendary ancient Greek poet traditionally credited with composing The Iliad and The Odyssey, foundational works of Western literature. Though his historical existence is debated, these epic poems, composed around the 8th century BCE and passed down through oral tradition, have profoundly shaped storytelling, poetry, and culture for nearly three millennia.