In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it.
"A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
- ISBN10 0701161205
- ISBN13 9780701161200
- Publish Date 16 September 1993 (first published 7 September 1978)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 9 August 2005
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Chatto & Windus
- Edition Collected ed
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 160
- Language English