The Winter Wolf

About this book

The story of Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Trojan War, told by Achilles himself. The central character in the Iliad, Achilles has always been an enigma, a great warrior who does not want to fight, the scourge of the Trojans who says he has no quarrel with them. We hear of his anger at a slight and of his wounded pride, but we are never shown why this man, a hero to his men, a respected friend of kings, the beloved brother of Patroclus, behaves in such way at such a crucial time. In this first volume of The Winter Wolf, we finally hear Achilles' side of the story. From his father's voyage on the Argo and his meeting with Achilles' mother, the goddess Thetis, to Priam begging for Hector's body outside the walls of Troy, The Winter Wolf describes how Achilles became the greatest and most reluctant warrior of Bronze Age Greece and why he is at Troy, fighting for a king he despises. Far from another retelling of the Iliad, The Winter Wolf strips away the mythologising of Homer and portrays the realities of the Trojan War on a human scale. It describes the pitilessness of war and the endemic violence of the Bronze Age through the eyes of Achilles, from his first memories as a small boy, hungering after glory, to a cold night outside the walls of Troy with the corpses of two great and noble men for company.