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

He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

wayward

‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’

Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

Then he would leave for the underworld, where I could never go, for gods are the opposite of death.

She spoke each word as if it were a stone she built her future with.

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.

Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days. But

Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different colour, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon.