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.

I nearly cried on the tube reading it on my tiny phone, I could imagine scenes in the climax as clearly as if they were played on a movie screen in front of me. You will not know until you read it what the desperation of that hill and that fence in the night felt like. It felt vivid and real! And that is such a rarity.

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The vanquished Athenians are being held captive in Syracusan quarries. Lampo’s best friend, Gelon, is “mad for” the Athenian tragedian Euripides, and the pair offer the starving prisoners sustenance in exchange for recitations from his plays. They then cast them in their own productions of “Medea” and “The Trojan Women”. Lennon’s fiction has appeared in The Irish Times and the Stinging Fly and his stories have been nominated the Hennessy Emerging Writer Award and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. In 2019 and 2021, he was awarded Arts Council bursaries. He looked up at me. All his features seemed to shiver. It was as if his skin were water and a soft wind played upon it. Not long after I went to the kitchen and cleaned the cups, the plate and spoons. I took special care with the plate and washed it twice. In a few minutes there was no trace that the old man or his dog had ever been there. Just a dark streak of red on the tiles which I scrubbed with boiling hot water. Fig Tree publishing director Helen Garnons-Williams said: “Reading Ferdia’s novel for the first time felt like a jolt of electricity. It’s an extraordinary achievement and we are incredibly excited to be publishing it at Fig Tree. His writing is bold and beautifully crafted, darkly funny, thrilling, and profoundly affecting. Glorious Exploits is an unforgettable novel about brotherhood and war, beauty and violence and about our collective urge to tell stories and make art even in the direst of circumstances and the darkest of times.”

Lampo and Gelon are local potters, young men with no work and barely two obols to rub together. When they take to visiting the nearby quarry, they discover prisoners who will, in desperation, recite lines from the plays of Euripides for scraps of bread and a scattering of olives. The novel features two friends, Lampo and Gelon who are unemployed potters during the Peloponnesian war. Syracuse defeated invading Athenians and imprisoned them in a quarry. The two friends like to go to the quarry and mess with them to pass the time. Gelon often has them recite from his favorite playwrite, Euripedes and gets the idea to stage a play with the Athenian prisoners as actors, the closest he ever gets to seeing his hero's work staged in Athens. We see the process as they bring it to life, securing an eccentric patron, getting to know the 'actors', collecting a group of children to assist, securing different elements they need, and promoting the play. Along the way we really get to know the characters and root for them even when they don't necessarily deserve it. A very special, very clever, very entertaining novel' Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha As a lover of Euripides and the classical playwrights, I thought this book was a fantastic modern tribute to them, highlighting the intersections between politics, war, ethics, and drama in the classical world. Having spent about seven years in Paris, Lennon now lives in Norwich with his family. He studied history and classics at University College Dublin, then graduated into the 2008 economic crash and taught English in Granada while making his first forays into writing. Later, he did an MA at UEA, taking Rebecca Stott’s “brilliant” historical fiction class alongside Imogen Hermes Gowar.

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Syracuse is battle-scarred, orphaned children running amok, and the novel contemplates the difficulty of forgiveness in the aftermath of war and the moral complexities of imprisonment. Although the book was begun long before, it’s tempting to draw parallels with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like Russia, says Lennon, Athens never publicly stated that its aims were imperialistic.

I’m surprised to hear Lennon doesn’t have much performing experience, so vividly does he evoke the unifying power of theatre. But he does compare writing fiction to method acting, and he certainly succeeds in getting under his characters’ skins. A “deeply flawed” narrator, Lampo’s “rogue’s confession” reveals his vulnerabilities, earning your affection and trust. His gags and missteps make you laugh, roll your eyes and ultimately root for him as he falls in love and learns to fight for what he wants. Best friends Gelon and Lampo live in a rapidly growing and changing city, jobless after their factory closed, Lampo still living with his mother at thirty, Gelon grieving the loss of his family. Unemployed and with little money, life revolves around visiting the bar and dreaming, all too aware that they are have nots in a world of haves. So far so familiar, only our protagonists live in Syracuse nearly two and a half thousand years ago, a city that, against all odds, fought off the Athenians three years before the book starts - which is why there are several thousand Athenian men imprisoned in their quarries, dying slowly of disease and starvation. Men who are so grateful for few scraps of food they'll recite poetry in return for olives. And Gelon really adoresThe story itself: a tale of overcoming differences, the power of art and love, brotherhood, romance, war, quests, victory, defeat, heartbreak, Glorious Exploits honestly had it all. It was both an epic and a tragedy and a comedy. The plot of the novel nearly mirrored the plays put on by the characters inside it. It was fully fledged and magnificent. I have struggled for some time to write this review, as I have struggled to summarise just how much, and in how many ways, I love this book. And how I think it is so necessary, and so vital, particularly to our understanding of the ancient world. With this in mind, I thought the concept was cool, but I was reading the book for a pretty obscure reason that had nothing to do with the genre or plot. So I was very happy when I fell in love with it. Like his hero, Hilary Mantel, Lennon approaches an historical turning point—the Athenian invasion of Sicily during the Peloponnesian War—from an unexpected angle, writing about Athens and theatre from an illiterate Syracusan potter’s perspective.

What an absolute blinder of a book! Glorious Exploits is a refreshingly unique take on the current trend for novels set in Ancient Greece. It chooses a bold historical setting: the aftermath of Athen’s most infamous disaster, the Sicilian expedition, where thousands of Athenians lost their lives and several thousand were imprisoned in stone quarries near Syracuse. And in this grim war-ravaged setting it creates a story both laugh-out-loud funny and brutal: we follow Syracusan Lampo as he and his pal Gelon attempt to stage two plays by Euripides (Medea and Trojan Women). The catch? Well, Lampo and Gelon are but lowly unemployed potters, fond of the drink. And they’ve decided the only proper way to stage Euripides is with an Athenian cast.. Sublime. Pitch-perfect dialogue, a fast-moving story that is both dark and lyrically beautiful, tragic and funny in equal measure. Glorious Exploits is an astonishingly original and gripping story of brotherhood, war and art. Ferdia Lennon is a fierce new talent.” Fear not,” says I. “We come not to punish, though you Athenian dogs deserve punishment. Gelon and I are merciful. We come—”

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Sorry, I knew more, but I can’t seem to … My head, it’s broken, see, I forget faces, and I can’t remember my … I swear I knew more.” The Ministry of Time is Sceptre’s superlead début for 2024, acquired in a 48-hour pre-empt. It has sold in 19 territories to date, and TV and film rights were optioned after a 21-way auction. The novel opens with the unnamed female civil servant narrator interviewing for a new job and learning that the British government has developed the means to travel through time. She will work as a “bridge”, a liaison and housemate, for an “expat” rescued from history: Commander Graham Gore (RN circa 1809-circa 1847). Four other expats (all fictional) are also brought into the 21st century. I did not know anything about the Peloponnesian war or Euripides going into this, but I appreciated the glimpse into this place and time which felt well researched but accessible. This accessability is also helped by the MCs not being war heroes or gods like a lot of ancient/historic greek retellings.