Hot on heels of Achilles
To say that it is based on part of Homer’s Illiad could be a recipe for the excesses of see-what-I-can-do literary fiction. Instead the pleasure of the book is in the simplicity of its telling.
The story itself could be rendered on the back of an envelope: Achilles kills Hector and denies him a burial. Hector’s father, Priam, decides to strip himself of all royal trappings and face Achilles as man-to-man, father-to-father, and ask for his son’s body for burial.
