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

Each word was dark as an axe-head, heavy and unrelenting, and my blood drained at every blow.

‘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.’

He had the trick of speaking like one, rolling words like great boulders, lost in the details of his own legend.

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

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.

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

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

But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

wayward