Second paragraph of third chapter:

These are the things the poets say she shall dream of.

Second of Claire North’s excellent Penelope trilogy, this time narrated by the goddess Aphrodite, with our heroine still waiting for her husband (who is dallying far away with the nymph Calypso), and also dealing with the desperately ill Orestes and the greedy Menelaus, kings of adjoining cities on the mainland whose quarrel is being played out in Ithaca. There is also a locked-room murder mystery for Penelope to solve, with the help of Helen who is vividly sketched as a character.

I was reading this at the same time as Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad (review coming soon) but actually my mind kept turning to Roger Lancelyn Green’s The Luck of Troy, told from the point of view of Nicostratus, Helen’s son by Menelaus who accompanied her to Troy at the start of the war. Nicostratus is a key character here as well, but North has him as Menelaus’ illegitimate son, full of resentment and an all round bad guy who is at the centre of the murder mystery. North’s characterization is very memorable, even of names who have been talked about for millennia.

You can get House of Odysseus here.