'One of the most original and brilliant debuts in years' Irish Times
'Bold and totally unexpected, I loved this book' Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
'A very special, very clever, very entertaining novel' Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha

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So Gelon says to me, 'Let's go down and feed the Athenians. The weather's perfect for feeding Athenians.'

It's 412 BC, and Athens' invasion of Sicily has failed catastrophically. Thousands of Athenian soldiers are held captive in the quarries of Syracuse, starving, dejected and hanging on by the slimmest of threads.

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. With not much to fill their time, they take to visiting the nearby quarry, where they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides in return for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives.

And so an idea is born: the men will put on Medea in the quarry. A proper performance to be sung of down the ages. Because after all, you can hate the Athenians for invading your territory, but still love their poetry.

But as the performance draws near and the audacity of their enterprise dawns on them, it becomes difficult to d