Canongate the Myths

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession and The Children's Book comes an extraordinary tale, inspired by the norse myth of Ragnarok. It is read by one of Britain's best-loved actresses Harriet Walter and is the latest publication in Canongate's powerful and critically-acclaimed myth series.

Now that I'm dead I know everything, “The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus” retold on audio. Margaret Atwood gives Penelope a modern and witty voice to tell her side of the story, and set the record straight for good.

Girl meets boy. It's a story as old as time. But what happens when an old story meets a brand new set of circumstances? Ali Smith's remix of Ovid's most joyful metamorphosis is a story about the kind of fluidity that can't be bottled and sold. It is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love and transformation, a story of puns and doubles, reversals and revelations. Funny and fresh, poetic and political, here is a tale of change for the modern world. The “Myths” series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

Part of a series of books containing myths as retold by first-rank contemporary authors, this is Alexander McCall Smith's telling of the Celtic myth of Dream Angus, a god of love, youth, beauty, and also the bringer of dreams. He is cherished by all, but fated to love only Caér, the swan maiden from his own dreams. Smith spins five charming stories of Dream Angus with five tales of his modern alter egos.

The Myth of Samson retold unabridged in exhilarating and lucid prose. The journey of a lonely and tortured soul who never found a true home in the world, who was uncomfortable in his very body and who, some might say, was the precursor of today's suicide bombers.

This is not a gospel. This is a story. In this ingenious and spell-binding retelling of the life of Jesus, Philip Pullman revisits the most influential story ever told. Charged with mystery, compassion and enormous power, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ throws fresh light on who Jesus was and asks the reader questions that will continue to resonate long after the final page is turned. For, above all, this book is about how stories become stories.

“The Myth of Atlas and Heracles” retold and performed by Dick Hill and Susie Breck. Weight turns the familiar on its head to show us ourselves in a new light.

Labyrinth 1 is an intricate structure of intercommunicating passages, through which it is difficult to find one's way without a clue; a maze. They have never met, they have been assigned strange pseudonyms, they inhabit identical rooms, which open out onto very different landscapes, and they have entered into a dialogue, which they cannot escape-a discourse defined and destroyed by the "Helmet of Horror". Its wearer is the dominant force they call Asterisk, a force for good and ill in which the Minotaur is forever present and Theseus is the great unknown. Victor Pelevin has created a mesmerising world where the surreal and the hyperreal collide. "The Helmet of Horror" is structured according to the Internet exchanges of the twenty-first century, yet instilled with the figures and narratives of classical mythology. It is a labyrinthine examination of epistemological uncertainty that radically reinvents the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur for an age where information is abundant, but knowledge is ultimately unattainable.