What beauties the book contains! There are many pages in it so saturated with warm and lovely intimacies that one reads absorbed

An astonishingly avant-garde novel

I do not claim to be a literary critic, but I know dirt when I smell it, and here is dirt in heaps- festering, putrid heaps which smell to high Heaven

Lawrence was the first literary artist to emphasise the huge importance of sex as a means of human fulfillment

Its questions about marriage and eroticism, grief and the frightening blankness of nature, have made it one of our century's most popular novels

Absorbing, uplifting and truly impressive

This is a great story...Malouf's beautiful language puts fresh flesh on to these ancient characters

Few writers possess the natural lyric grace of Malouf

Malouf's poetic yet muscular prose is wonderful

A marvel- beautifully written, surprisingly moving, quietly rather brilliant

While Malouf's chief interest is in the human impulses that lie behind the epic deeds, he remains faithful to the beliefs and values of the ancient world

immensely moving, modern novel

A dignified performance ... in writing this novel Malouf is honouring a great work and also making a great work of his own ... his graceful fiction deals in truth and is always beautiful

Beautifully written and very moving, Ransom is a reimagining that respects Homer's original while expanding expertly on its themes.

Malouf captures the moving humanity of Priam's grief

Lyrical reworking of the final scenes of The Iliad

This superb novel goes by in a heartbeat, so smooth and engrossing is David Malouf's prose...It is a touching tale, full of pain, but rendered beautifully by Malouf's humanity

An audacious reworking of Homer's Iliad.

David Malouf...has given Homer's epic fresh life in this haunting mood piece...a graceful, eloquent text dominated by rage and sorrow

This novel explores the timeless motifs of epic, in miniature

You know it ends in death, and so do Malouf's haunted protagonists, but this telling, at once unfussy and wonderfully poetic, breathes warm life into a great epic

Breathtaking skill...an extraordinary emotional charge.

A finely honed, writerly and wise revisiting of one of the most famous episodes in The Iliad, when Priam the King of Troy goes to bring home the body of his dead son Hector. No-one in prose has managed to better Malouf's imaginative recreation of the Homeric world.

a potent new yarn... Beautifully written in simple language freighted with meaning, Ransom explores a king's impulse to act as a mourning father.