Helen of Troy
by Margaret George
- Used
- Paperback
- Condition
- used - very good/none - paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0143038990
- ISBN 13
- 9780143038993
- Seller
-
Oakville, Ontario, Canada
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
This book has been read, some wear to covers and minor staining to back cover. Minor pencil marking first inner page, no other markings inner pages. Spine intact, no creass. "A lush, seductive novel of the legendary beauty whose face launched a thousand ships
Daughter of a god, wife of a king, prize of antiquitys bloodiest war, Helen of Troy has inspired artists for millennia. Now Margaret George, the highly acclaimed bestselling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to the myth that is Helen of Troy.
Margaret George breathes new life into the great Homeric tale by having Helen narrate her own story. Through her eyes and in her voice, we experience the young Helens discovery of her divine origin and her terrifying beauty. While hardly more than a girl, Helen married the remote Spartan king Menelaus and bore him a daughter. By the age of twenty, the worlds most beautiful woman was resigned to a passionless marriage until she encountered the handsome Trojan prince Paris. And once the lovers flee to Troy, war, murder, and tragedy become inevitable.
In Helen of Troy, Margaret George has captured a timeless legend in a mesmerizing tale of a woman whose life was destined to create strife and destroy civilizations." Good Reads "Margaret George is a rolling stone who has lived in many places, beginning her traveling at the age of four when her father joined the U.S. diplomatic service and was posted to a consulate in Taiwan. The family traveled on a freighter named after Ulysses' son Telemachus that took thirty days to reach Taiwan, where they spent two years. Following that they lived in Tel Aviv (right after the 1948 war, when it was relatively quiet), Bonn and Berlin (during the spy-and-Cold-War days) before returning--at the height of Elvis-mania--to Washington DC, where Margaret went to high school. Margaret's first piece of published writing, at the age of thirteen, was a letter to TIME Magazine defending Elvis against his detractors. (Margaret has since been to Graceland.)
But it was earlier in Israel that Margaret, an avid reader, began writing novels to amuse herself when she ran out of books to read. Interestingly, the subject of these was not what lay around her in the Middle East, but the American west, which she had never set foot in. (Now that she lives in the American Midwest she writes about the Middle East!) Clearly writing in her case followed Emily Dickinson's observation "There is no frigate like a book" and she used it to go to faraway places. Now she has added another dimension to that travel by specializing in visiting times remote from herself.
Neither of these horse sagas got published, but the ten-year-old author received an encouraging note from an editor at Grosset & Dunlap, telling her she had a budding talent but should work on her spelling.
It was also in Israel that Margaret started keeping land tortoises as pets, an interest which she still follows today. She had a great affinity for animals and nature and that led her to a double major at Tufts University in English literature and biology. Following that she received an MA in ecology from Stanford University--one of the earliest departments to offer such a concentration. Today she is active in environmental and animal conservation groups.
Combining her interests led her to a position as a science writer at the National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland for four years.
Her marriage at the end of that time meant moving, first to St. Louis, then to Uppsala, Sweden, and then to Madison, Wisconsin, where she and her husband Paul have lived for more than twenty years now. They have one grown daughter who lives in California and is in graduate school.
Through all this Margaret continued to write, albeit slowly and always on only one project at a time. She wrote what she refers to as her 'Ayn Rand/adventure novel' in college and her 'Sex and the City' novel in Washington DC. It was in St. Louis that she suddenly got the idea of writing a 'psycho-biography' of Henry VIII. She had never seen such a thing done but became convinced the king was a victim of bad PR and she should rescue his good name. Her background in science meant that only after thoroughly researching the literature and scholarship on Henry VIII would she embark on the novel itself. She sought the guidance of a Tudor historian at Washington University for a reading list, and proceeded from there.
It was actually fourteen years between her initial idea and the publication of The Autobiography of Henry VIII. The book made an impression for several reasons: first, because no one had ever written a novel sympathetic to the king before; second, because it covered his entire life from before birth until after his death, making it almost a thousand pages long, and third, because it was so fact-filled." Good Reads
Synopsis
The New York Times bestseller from Margaret George, author of Mary, Called Magdalene and Elizabeth I With her amazing ability to summon the voices of historical characters, Margaret George tells the story of the woman whose face "launched a thousand ships" in Helen of Troy . Laden with doom, yet surprising in its moments of innocence and beauty, this is a beautifully told story of a legendary woman and her times. An exquisite page-turner with a cast of irresistible characters--Odysseus, Hector, Achilles, Priam, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as well as Helen and Paris themselves--and a wealth of material that reproduces the Age of Bronze in all its glory, Helen of Troy brings to life a war that we have all learned about but never before experienced.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Ohkwaho Books and Fine Art (CA)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 653-2023
- Title
- Helen of Troy
- Author
- Margaret George
- Format/Binding
- Softcover
- Book Condition
- used - very good
- Jacket Condition
- none - paperback
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0143038990
- ISBN 13
- 9780143038993
- Publisher
- Penguin Books
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2007-05
- Pages
- 643
- Size
- 21.2 cm x 13.6 cm
- Keywords
- Fiction, Historical
Terms of Sale
Ohkwaho Books and Fine Art
About the Seller
Ohkwaho Books and Fine Art
About Ohkwaho Books and Fine Art
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