Return to Ithaca: 1

He tried to avoid it. He yoked an ox and a donkey together and plowed his fields with salt, pretending madness to escape the war that had nothing to do with him. Then Palamedes placed his infant son in front of the plow, and Odysseus swerved, and everything was decided. The War is the first book in the Return to Ithaca series - a four-part literary retelling of the most celebrated journey in Western literature, told entirely from the interior of the man making it. Before Odysseus could come home, he had to survive ten years at Troy: the politics of the Greek camp, the impossible relationship with Achilles, the embassy that failed, the fabricated evidence against Palamedes, the wooden horse, the night the city burned. This is not the heroic tradition's clean and celebrated version of the war. It is the war from inside the mind of its most intelligent participant - a man who saw everything clearly, who made choices he could not entirely justify, and who sailed from Troy's burning shore carrying twenty years' worth of things he was going to have to live with. The journey home begins here.