Lux - Softcover

Elizabeth Cook is an award-winning author, poet, librettist, and scholar. Born in Gibraltar, she spent her childhood in Nigeria and Dorset. She has been the British Academy Chatterton Lecturer and a Hawthornden Fellow, and has written for publications including the London Review of Books. She is the editor of the Oxford Authors John Keats and author of the acclaimed novel Achilles (Methuen and Picador USA) which, in a performance version, won a Fringe First at Edinburgh and has been performed at the National Theatre. She wrote the libretto for Francis Grier’s The Passion of Jesus of Nazareth, commissioned and broadcast by the BBC. She now lives in London and Suffolk.

Praise for Lux

“Elizabeth Cook’s visual imagination is as sharp and gorgeous as any Pre-Raphaelite painter's. Her psychological penetration is deep and compassionate. They are both unfailing as she weaves together the stories of King David and Bathsheba and of Thomas Wyatt and Ann Boleyn. If this is, in a way, a tour de force, it doesn’t read like that: the connections are organic and realistic, gripping the reader and integral to the rapid movement of the narrative.”
―John Drury, author of Music at Midnight

Praise for Achilles

“[A] poetic masterpiece, a psychologically acute portrait...Achilles is also unfailingly modern: swift, cinematic, sexually explicit, and ravishingly beautiful.”
―The Atlantic Monthly

“This book is a tiny treasure...If, as they say, every generation demands its own translation of Homer, Cook brings us here a Homer for the MTV generation.”
―Geraldine Brooks, Slate

“Everything in this novel, except the number of pages, is larger than life, and in reading it we are returned to our own lives with a sense of larger possibility. This bright, fierce book reminds us that, however grievous, however inevitable our losses, we do not bear them alone.”
―Boston Sunday Globe

“[A] meditative, intense retelling of the life of Homer’s hero, remarkable for its lush artfulness and the subtle intelligence of its prose.”
―Meghan O’Rourke, literary editor of Slate

“This forceful re-creation of the life of Achilles sacrifices nothing to modernity...At the same time, this brief, intense novel is unmistakably modern in intent...Fragments of keen, almost carnal prose have the cumulative effect of a requiem.”
―The New Yorker

“[A] brilliantly conceived retelling of the plight of one of Homer's heroes, British writer Cook demonstrates the same skill that has made her poetry and examinations of Renaissance literature so wonderfully memorable. Cleaving closely to the Odyssey but embellishing her tale with sharply imagined creative flourishes, Cook navigates the rise and fall of the powerful Greek warrior Achilles...The heady brew is made even richer by Cook's brave incorporation of an episode from the life of poet John Keats in the surprising final chapter, which suggests a curious affinity between the prophetic writer and the slain hero. At 128 pages, Cook's tale is tightly woven, and this brevity makes for an extreme reading experience. The genre of retellings of classical epics will surely be reinvigorated by this slim, exceptional interpretation of the heroic fable of Achilles.” STARRED REVIEW
―Publishers Weekly

“[I]nspired...In language more chaste and essential than prose fiction normally employs, Cook points up the primal quality of Achilles' story, so that we see its tragedy―that the supremely gifted, too, must die―as utterly universal. An Achilles or a Keats, as Cook argues by means of a coda about the great young hero of Romantic poetry, comes but once in an epoch to make us grasp our immortal glory and our mortal ignominy securely enough to celebrate as well as despair.” STARRED REVIEW
―Ray Olson, Booklist