Orpheus

This insightful and visionary study, treading a perfect line between imagination and scholarship, is as readable and necessary as a fine novel. Ted Hughes, another mythographer, would have loved it * Independent *Ann Wroe has an acute eye for pastoral detail…and takes a novelist’s care in exploring character and evoking atmosphere… [Orpheus] will leave you dancing * New Statesman *This is a most remarkable book… most rewarding… [a book] that will surely enhance Ann Wroe’s already considerable reputation * Irish Times *Orpheus: The Song of Life is a book of wonders, learned, playful and passionate…For all her studies, her wide reading, her historical dilligence, Wroe’s method is instinctive, as she searches for inspirations and connections across the millennia – John Banville * Guardian *Curious… there are moments of sublime writing * Scotland on Sunday *strange, original * Sunday Times *This one really is a song … It evokes, but it also embodies, its subject – Brian Morton * Tablet *a dense, vigorous portrait – Maggie Fergusson * Intelligent Life *Manages, in prose both rhapsodic and precise, to convey the allure of the legendary bard from ancient Greece to modern times. This myth has flowered into truth – Boyd Tonkin * Independent, Books of the Year *

Ann Wroe is the Obituaries editor of The Economist, and has written its weekly obituary for almost two decades. She is the author of eight previous works of non-fiction, including biographies of Pontius Pilate (shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award), Perkin Warbeck, Shelley, Orpheus (winner of the Criticos Prize) and St Francis. She lives in Brighton and London.

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