Mary Renault

During his first twenty years of life, Alexander the Great is torn between admiration, hatred, and love for his father, asserts his independence from his mother's jealous love, is tutored by Aristotle, and becomes king of Macedon. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Fire from Heaven

The last of the wine

a novel

The charioteer

Ancient Athens paid tribute to its Cretan overlord each year by sending the finest of its sons and daughters to Crete each year to be trained for "bull-dancing", a sport that cost the Athenian youths their lives. Theseus, prince of Athens, substitutes himself for one of the youths and sails out to meet his fate in the ring.

The King Must Die

The Persian boy

Nikeratos, an actor of ancient Greece, greatly admires and devotes himself to Dion, a student of Plato, who is determined to bring democracy to Syracuse

The Mask of Apollo

As this final installment in the Alexander the Great trilogy opens we find the general dying. Tracing the fifteen years after his death we see his mighty empire disintegrate.

Funeral Games

In this sequel to The King Must Die Theseus defies the Gods’ and claims the throne of Athens a move that culminates in the terrible, fateful destruction of the house of Minos -- the Minotaur.

The Bull from the Sea

Sicily -- Keos -- Samos -- Athens -- Sacred way -- Author's note -- Chronology.

The Praise Singer

The lives of two nonconformist women on a London houseboat are disrupted when a doctor tries to win the love of both of the women, in a provocative romantic comedy and portrait of bohemian 1930s London. Reprint.

A Novel

The Friendly Young Ladies

The Nature of Alexander

The Alexander Trilogy

Combines contemporaneous accounts, critically studied legends, reproductions of pertinent artworks, and photographs to provide a full-scale, nonideological biography of the Macedonian conqueror and empire builder

Funeral Games.[Historical novel of the combat of Alexander's heirs,323BC-308BC].

A Virago Modern Classic

Return to Night

“Renault’s best historical novel yet.... Every detail has solid historical testimony to support it.”–New York Review of Books After Alexander’s death in 323 B.C .his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives, and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasingly undisciplined Macedonian army. Most failed and were killed in the attempt. For no one possessed the leadership to keep the great empire from crumbling. But Alexander’s legend endured to spread into worlds he had seen only in dreams.

"The Bull from the Sea" is the story of Theseus, King of Athens, but also Mary Renault's brilliant historical reconstruction of ancient Greek politics. Throughout his reign, Theseus is torn between his genius for kingship and his truant craving for adventure. As Theseus for a dynastic marriage with Phaedra, Pirithoos, the pirate prince, lures him off to explore the unknown Euxine, where he meets and captures the young warrior priestess Hippolyta. She is the love of his life, and that love is the crux of his fate. The bull of Marathon, the battle of the Lapiths and Kentaurs, and the moon-goddess cult of Pontos are merely a portion of the legendary material that Renault weaves into the fabric of great historical fiction. Whether or not these myths have their far-distant origin in actual events, the author's imagination and scholarship have invested them with immediate amd magical reality.

Praise Singer

romanzo

Il ragazzo Persiano

At twenty, when his reign began, Alexander the Great was already a seasoned soldier and a complex, passionate man. Fore from Heaven tells the story of the boy Alexander, and the years that shaped him. Resolute, fearless, and inheriting a striking beauty, Alexander still needed much to make him The Great. He must survive - though with lifelong scars - the dark furies of his Dionysiac mother, who kept him incertain evenof his own paternity; respect his fathers' talent for war and kingcraft, though sickened by his sexual grossness; and come to terms with his heritage from both.

Mary Renault

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