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Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
• 2025 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
• Named a Best Book of 2024 by Slate, the Guardian, and the New York Public Library
A Sunday Times bestseller, Glorious Exploits was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and selected as a BBC2 Between the Covers book club pick. It was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and has been shortlisted for many other awards.
“A stunning (and stunningly fun) meditation on companionship, humanity and the role of performance in keeping us all afloat. . . . In a contemporary moment of war, Lennon’s sharp eye for the barbarism that can accompany society’s theatrical coping mechanisms feels almost too relevant . . . [A] thrilling and heartbreaking debut novel.”
―Talya Zax, The Washington Post
“Remarkable . . . Glorious Exploits owes its emotional impact to the clear-eyed skepticism that makes its hopefulness hard-won . . . Lennon’s artistry allows him, without being naive or pious, to make the case for art.”
―Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books
“If the googly eyes on the cover didn’t make it apparent, Ferdia Lennon’s knockout debut novel Glorious Exploits is hilarious. In fact, it’s loaded with dark humor literally from page one. Never before has history been such a riot, and so indelibly endearing.”
―Donna Edwards, Associated Press
About the Book
On the island of Sicily amid the Peloponnesian War, the Syracusans have figured out what to do with the surviving Athenians who had the gall to invade their city: they’ve herded the sorry prisoners of war into a rock quarry and left them to rot. Looking for a way to pass the time, Lampo and Gelon, two unemployed potters with a soft spot for poetry and drink, head down into the quarry to feed the Athenians if, and only if, they can manage a few choice lines from their great playwright Euripides. Before long, the two mates hatch a plan to direct a full-blown production of Medea. After all, you can hate the people but love their art. But as opening night approaches, what started as a lark quickly sets in motion a series of extraordinary events, and our wayward heroes begin to realize that staging a play can be as dangerous as fighting a war, with all sorts of risks to life, limb, and friendship.
Told in a contemporary Irish voice and as riotously funny as it is deeply moving, Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable ode to the power of art in a time of war, brotherhood in a time of enmity, and human will throughout the ages.
About the Author
FERDIA LENNON was born and raised in Dublin. He holds a BA in History and Classics from University College Dublin and an MA in Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. Glorious Exploits is his first novel. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son.
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