In The Shape Of A Boar - Softcover

In pre-Homeric times, the Greek heroes united one last time to hunt down the Boar of Kalydon. Three and a half millennia later, the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon is re-enacted, and once again re-told. In the final months of WWII, Greek partisans pursue their quarry, an SS officer, in the same mountains the ancient Boar of Kalydon once roamed. Witness to the hunt is Sol Memel, a young Rumanian-Jewish poet fleeing for his life. Sol has lost his family and abandoned his lover, Ruth. Sol¿s role in the SS officer¿s eventual capture and killing inspires him to rewrite the ancient myth as a poem. When Ruth reappears twenty-five years later and proposes a film based on the writing of the poem, the ghosts of Sol¿s wartime past materialise. And behind them stand the ghosts of ancient Greece, the long-dead heroes who hold the truth behind the story of the original hunt.

Lawrence Norfolk was born in 1963. He won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, Lemprière's Dictionary.