Circe: The International No. 1 Bestseller - Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

do not know which she treasured more: the luminous beads themselves, or the envy of her sisters when she wore them.

She was a goddess of torment and understood the eloquence of violence.

I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I’m afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

Some stories he told me by daylight. Others came only when the fire was burnt out, and there was no one to know his face but the shadows.

Now that Medea had named my loneliness, it hung from everything, clinging like spiderwebs, unavoidable.

The only thing that calmed him was the sea. The wind that was as restless as he was, the waves filled with their motion.

I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us.

isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only