Glorious Exploits

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the performance draws near and the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes difficult to distinguish between enemies and friends. And Lampo, whose ambitions have never stretched beyond having enough coin for the next jug of wine, finds his aspirations elevated, his heart entangled, and his courage tested in ways he could never have imagined.

Glorious Exploits was published by Penguin Fig Tree in the UK and Henry Holt in the US. Translation rights have been sold in over ten languages. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and selected as a BBC2 Between the Covers book club pick. It was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and has been shortlisted for many other awards.