The Way to Colonos
Sophocles Retold
Format:Paperback
Publisher:McNally Jackson Books
Publishing:12th Feb '26
£12.59 was £13.99
This title is due to be published on 12th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A fiery modern retelling of three Greek tragedies, “written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master.” (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword)
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos recasts three seminal plays by Sophocles into tales of modern women and warfare, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone—a stylish woman in her thirties—wheeling her father, Oedipus, onto the ferry to Colonos, is disgusted by his self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother, Clytemnestra, that may never come to pass. Philoctetes, a castaway soldier, navigates shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.
As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work—written in English, her second language—offers particularly “shocking insight into the secret lives of young women” and is only now “free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes.”
“A woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off [of] conventions . . . She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes.”
—Rachel Cusk, from the Foreword
“Who but a Greek has a better right to raid Greek tragedy? Kay Cicellis, a Greek who writes the kind of English most English writers might envy . . . proves brilliantly that heart and character can still forge chains as shackling as those of 23 centuries ago . . . Cicellis has chosen to contract her drama to excellent effect [with] largeness of heart and a glowing style. If her people are the losers of the world, they are dressed in a human dignity of her making.”
—TIME
“Kay Cicellis will go very far.”
—Vita Sackville-West
“Cicellis . . . looks at life steadily and as if for the first time, with profound watchfulness, as if nothing else mattered. That is her essential originality; she has her own vision of life . . . Cicellis takes life from many sides, and is always sensitively conscious of the quality of the situation she describes. She has a style which catches the intimate nature of things and never stops at the surface. She is a remarkable writer.”
—Edwin Muir, The Observer
“One of the most refreshing and exciting of the world’s younger women novelists.”
—Linda Brandi, The New York Times
“Cicellis [has a] luminous sensibility and genuine compassion . . . Her prose is as light-intoxicated as the air of her native Greece, but her vision of life has a dark, existential pathos.”
—TIME
“Her style is simple . . . her narrative is well-knit, and her detail cleverly observed and selected.”
—David Tylden-Wright, Times Literary Supplement
“Cicellis writes of very modern things and people . . . but the excellence of her writing lies in the fact that it has a timeless quality, a continuity with antiquity, a colour and warmth that is Greek whatever the time.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Cicellis . . . has a startling talent, and her fluent precision lends a kind of dignity to the characters she creates.”
—Marigold Johnson, Times Literary Supplement
“She is like Penelope at her web, shuttling the coloured threads to and fro, weaving into the pattern love and hate, laughter and death . . . infinitely subtle.”
—Peter Green, Daily Telegraph
“War and circumstance have made her an English writer of high intelligence and great perspicaciousness exactly expressed.”
—Martin Shuttleworth, The Listener
ISBN: 9781946022776
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
192 pages