Book Review – Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

About the Book

Ancient Sicily. Enter GELON: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter LAMPO: feckless, jobless, in need of a distraction.

Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads.

They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food.

And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry.

It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of.

What could possibly go wrong?

Format: Paperback (288 pages) Publisher: Fig Tree
Publication date: Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025, Glorious Exploits transports the reader to Syracuse in Sicily in the 5th century BC during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, and its allies. (I knew next to nothing about the Peloponnesian War but, to be honest, you don’t really need to know anything about it to enjoy the book.)

At the point the book opens an Athenian expedition to Sicily has ended in disaster with its fleet sunk and thousands of Athenians taken prisoner. With nowhere else to house them they’ve been imprisoned in a quarry in the baking sun barely surviving on the meagre rations they’re given. Sounds like a grim backdrop to a book doesn’t it? But somehow the author manages to find the humanity and the humour, albeit dark humour, in the situation through two brilliantly imagined characters: Lampo and Gelon.

Lampo is our narrator, telling the story with a delightful Irish lilt and wry humour. Somehow the modern dialogue doesn’t seem out of place, it’s just really funny. Shopping for supplies for an outing, he says, ‘I also grab an Italian white which the vintner says is “causing quite the stir”.’

Gelon has a passion for Greek plays, in particular those of the Athenian playwright Euripides and, fearing the defeat of Athens may mean his work being lost forever, comes up with the seemingly crazy notion of staging Euripides’ play Medea, and his new work The Trojan Women, using some of the prisoners as cast and the quarry as a theatre. Because perhaps it’s possible to be at war with another nation and still appreciate their art? Ironic then that Medea and The Trojan Women are about revenge and the consequences of war.

Lampo and Gelon hold casting sessions (with the promise of more generous rations for the successful) and set out to obtain financial backing for the enterprise, sets and costumes. They succeed in finding a patron who is an avid collector of objects from across the world. One object in his collection is particularly curious.

Their bold undertaking is fraught with problems but as Gelon says, ‘It’s poetry we’re doing… It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy’. Although they do meet with success, it quickly turns to tragedy as what’s being portrayed on stage is played out in real life, showing that, although art can convey universal emotions, unfortunately one of those is hate. It results in Lampo and Gelon embarking on an even more onerous task but one that shows a finer side of humanity.

Lampo and Gelon have been friends since childhood and their friendship is heartwarming. Lampo finds comfort in Gelon’s certainty, whilst Gelon depends on Lampo’s seemingly endless ability to get them out of sticky situations. But there’s sadness beneath the surface in both their lives. Gelon has lost his wife and son. Heartbreakingly, he often thinks he glimpses her but it always turns out to be just an illusion. Lampo, lame in one leg, is looking for love but the woman who’s captured his heart isn’t free to choose her own destiny. His efforts to rectify the situation are endearing.

Glorious Exploits is a terrifically entertaining story of friendship, and of optimism; the belief that ‘something’ will turn up. As Lampo says, ‘Anything is possible, and it always has been. For the world was once just a dream in a god’s eye, and the man who gives up on himself makes that very same god look away’.

In three words: Imaginative, funny, immersive

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. A Sunday Times bestseller, it was adapted for BBC Radio 4 and was the winner of the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2024 and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After spending many years in Paris, he now lives in Norwich with his wife and son. (Photo: Amazon author page)

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