Category: Reading Challenges

Book Review – Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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About the Book

Front cover of Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

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

Author Ferdia Lennon

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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Book Review – The Surgeon’s House by Jody Cooksley

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About the Book

London, 1883. The brutal murder of Rose Parmiter seems, at first glance, to be a random and senseless act. Rose was the beloved cook at Evergreen House, a place of refuge for women and children, a place from which they can start their lives afresh.

Proprietor Rebecca Harris is profoundly shocked by the death of her dear friend and alarmed at the mysterious events which begin to unfold shortly afterwards. Could the past be casting a shadow on the present? The malign legacy of the Everley family who called Evergreen home, cannot be ignored.

After two further deaths it becomes clear there is an evil presence infecting their sanctuary, and Rebecca must draw out the poison of the past so the Evergreen residents can finally make peace with the darkness in their lives.

Format: Hardcover (352 pages) Publisher: Allison & Busby
Publication date: 22nd May 2025 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Surgeon’s House is the follow-up to The Small Museum. If you haven’t read the earlier book never fear because there is a generous amount of detail about previous events. On the other hand, if you have read the earlier book you’ll either find the lengthy exposition a useful recap or think, as I did, I already know all this.

The narrative alternates between Rebecca as she attempts to discover the person responsible for Rose’s murder, as well as safeguard the future of Evergreen, and Grace, confined to a mental institution for ten years now and saved from the gallows only by the evidence of her father’s assistant and one time protegee, Edward Threlfall.

In my review of The Small Museum, I likened Grace to Mrs Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. In this book she’s more like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations, consumed by a desire to wreak revenge on those who have wronged her. Grace prides herself on her ability to manipulate others and sees her daughter Eloise, who was sent abroad to be adopted, as the vehicle for delivering vengeance. She also retains a perverted obsession with proving her father’s theories correct, something that would mean continuing his vile experiments. And she is coldly indifferent to the fate of her two sons.

Rebecca has worked to make Evergreen a place where women can leave their unhappy pasts (abuse, prostitution, children out of wedlock) behind and learn skills that might enable them to gain employment. It’s a community that has become more like a family and Evergreen’s cook, Rose, was a key part of this. Her loss is keenly felt, especially by Rebecca. Unfortunately, not everyone shares Rebecca’s enlightened views. They believe women such as those who live at Evergreen to be degenerate and sinful, deserving only of being put to work in laundries and having their children sent away.

The story also explores the prejudiced views held at the time about women’s predisposition to mental breakdown. Dr Threlfall is an ‘alienist’ (what we’d now call a psychiatrist) who although using ‘talking therapies’ to treat female patients also clings to unproven concepts. ‘Women are closer to madness than men, and it’s easier for their minds to fall ill because their bodies are weak; they cannot hold up. Women also suffer in the mind from the nature of their physiognomy, it is constantly changing.’ There are unsettling descriptions of young women being forcibly bundled into Threlfall’s consulting rooms by male relatives.

I pretty much worked out where things were going as soon as a particular character turned up and as events unfolded my feeling I was right became even stronger. In fact, I thought it was so obvious I wondered if the author had creating a huge red herring and I’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker.

I would have liked Rebecca’s husband George to feature more prominently, although he does make a crucial intervention at one point. However, this is really Rebecca and Grace’s story. They’re both exceptionally determined women but their motivations couldn’t be more different: evil in Grace’s case and generosity of spirit in Rebecca’s.

For me, The Surgeon’s House lacked the compelling Gothic element of The Small Museum but it will, I’m sure, be a hit with many historical fiction fans.

I received a review copy courtesy of Allison & Busby via NetGalley.

In three words: Engaging, dramatic, assured
Try something similar: The Household by Stacey Halls

About the Author

Author Jody Cooksley

Jody Cooksley studied literature at Oxford Brookes University and has a Masters in Victorian Poetry. Her debut novel The Glass House is a fictional account of the life of nineteenth-century photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron. The Small Museum, Jody’s third novel, won the 2023 Caledonia Novel Award. Jody is originally from Norwich and now lives in Cranleigh, Surrey.

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