In the Shape of a Boar

“One of the year’s most imaginative and challenging novels” from the acclaimed author of John Saturnall’s Feast (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).   Lawrence Norfolk’s In the Shape of a Boar is a juggernaut of a novel, an epic tour de force of love and betrayal, ancient myths and modern horrors. The story begins in the ancient world of mythic Greece, where a dark tale of treachery and destructive love unfolds amid the hunt for the Boar of Kalydon—a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of World War II, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer on a mission of vengeance. After the war, a young Jewish Romanian refugee, Solomon Memel, who was among the hunters will create a poem based on the experience, which becomes an international literary sensation. But the truth of what happened in the hills of Kalydon in 1945 is more complicated than it seems, and as the older Sol reunites with his childhood love in 1970s Paris, the dark memories and horrors of those days will emerge anew.   “An epic achievement . . . stitching together classical Greek culture and twentieth-century barbarism, the nature of human evil and the ambiguity of storytelling itself . . . Dazzling.”—San Francisco Chronicle   “Brilliant and exhaustively researched . . . In the Shape of a Boar is a Herculean task accomplished with bravado and style, but more than that, it’s storytelling of the highest echelon.”—The Hartford Courant   “Wonderfully complex . . . a fascinating story built from layered narrative lines.”—The Washington Post Book World