Return to Ithaca.book.3

He washed up on Calypso's shore with nothing — no ships, no men, no way home. And he stayed for seven years. The Island is the third book in the Return to Ithaca series — the long stillness at the center of the twenty years, and everything happening on either side of it. Calypso's island, where a goddess offered immortality and he refused it every morning, sitting on the shore looking toward Ithaca. Phaeacia, where Nausicaa found him on the beach and did not run. The feast in Alcinous's hall, where the blind bard sang of Troy and Odysseus wept and finally told the whole story from beginning to end. And Ithaca itself, where Penelope was weaving and unweaving, where Telemachus was growing up without a father, where the suitors had moved into the palace and begun consuming everything. The journey was almost over. The reckoning was close. Back Cover Text "After everything the sea had taken from him, he washed up on Phaeacia with nothing but his life and his name and the story he was carrying." For seven years, Odysseus sat on the same shore every morning and looked toward a horizon that held nothing but distance. Calypso had offered him immortality. He had refused it. He was waiting for something he couldn't force and couldn't predict — and then Hermes came with Zeus's message, and Calypso wept, and he built a raft. I. Ioakim's The Island moves between Calypso's remote shore, the extraordinary hospitality of the Phaeacians, and the palace at Ithaca where Penelope was holding what she could hold and Telemachus was becoming the man his father had not been present to watch him become. Three perspectives on the same long wait. Three people who did not know how close the end of waiting was. Book Three of the Return to Ithaca series.