Few debuts have arrived on the scene with the lightness and gravity, and that harken to the original, in its fullest sense, as Zachary Mason's luminous novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Yes, that Odyssey. This is one of the rare cases where one of the enduring works is taken on, with the result that the new work itself becomes adorned with the essence of timelessness."Spellbinding. In his versions of these ancient myths, Mason twists and jinks, renegotiating the journey to Ithaca with all the guile and trickery of Odysseus himself. Rarely is it so reassuring to be in the hands of such an unreliable narrator." - Simon Armitage. "A subtle, inventive, and moving meditation on what Louis MacNeice calls 'the drunkenness of things being various.'" - John Banville.