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Erewhon
Erewhon
Nov 24, 2025 11:49 AM

Author:Samuel Butler,Peter Mudford

Erewhon

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler's years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

Reviews

History and legend combine in an epic recreation of the Troy myth

—— Conn Iggulden

David Gemmell carries us away to a four-cornered, wholly convincing cosmos, so masterfully done that the reader thinks, 'Ah this is what it was really like'

—— Steven Pressfield

Gripping and fast-paced, intelligent and intensely readable... should appeal to anyone who enjoys an action-packed historical epic

—— Joanne Harris

The loyalties and betrayals, the love and the hate, the endless, everlasting courage of the men - and the women - of both sides are brought to life in this vivid, inspirational recreation of the Troy myth

—— Manda Scott

'Gruesomely entertaining ... intellectually fascinating'

—— Daily Mail

'A tragi-comedy of elegant and unrelieved blackness'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'Erudite and compelling... Genuinely hard to put down'

—— Sunday Times

'Wilson has always been a brilliant storyteller, who ­- unlike many of his no less famous contemporaries - is incapable of ever writing a boring line... Masterly... Always enthralling... Here is a book one races through, so eager is one to know what happens next... In [Wilson's] hands, as in James's, each turn of the screw succeeds in intensifying the reader's unease'

—— Francis King , Literary Review
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