A work of unusual intelligence and imagination...[a sort of] fantasia on what Ovid's life in exile might have been and, as time went by, became, as the quintessentially civilized man of letters was forced to come to terms with a harsh, pre-rational, thoroughly alien world

Elegant and resonant narrative...an exhilarating use of language

Haunting

David Malouf, a spare and delicate writer, presents here the first-person story of the Roman poet Ovid's exile in the distant, frosty wastes...hypnotic in its gripping accumulation of detail, its gradual unwrapping of human reality amid what at first seems a barbarian and unknowable environment. At the centre of this meticulously well-told tale is Ovid's encounter with a wild boy, brought up among the deer in the snow

Highly readable, sensitive and intensely moving ... a fine achievement

To speak of the novels of José Saramago is to speak of the sheer pleasure of reading