Age: 12+

This self-sufficient follow-up to Adèle Geras’s powerful novel Troy imagines events on Ithaka during the years in which Penelope awaits the return of her warrior husband Odysseus, whose adventures are hinted at in dreams. The central characters, invented by Geras in a cast otherwise borrowed from Homer’s The Odyssey, are Telemachus’s best friends, the twins Klymene and Ikarios, both of whom glimpse the gods as they walk among mortals and play out their own rivalries. The real protagonist of the book, though, is Aphrodite, who causes more chaos and disruption in Penelope’s palace than all the horde of slovenly, drunken, belligerent suitors in pursuit of the queen. The goddess makes Penelope’s wooers universally lascivious and some of the servant girls wanton; she causes both Klymene and Ikarios to have painful attachments and, above all, she explodes the legend of Penelope’s fidelity to the absent Odysseus. The book amounts to a riff on the subject of desire, rediscovering in Homer’s ancient story the full, enduring force of its passion and violence. Young adults will be thrilled.

(David Fickling £12.99)

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