Get Sleepy: The Odyssey
Narrated by Thomas Jones
Get Sleepy: The Odyssey retells Homer's epic of Odysseus's long voyage home, adapted by Alexandra Turney for listening in the dark.
The war at Troy is over, and the Greek kings have sailed for home. Odysseus, the cleverest of them, has the farthest to go and the worst luck getting there. His ships are blown off course to the land of the lotus-eaters, where the men who taste the flower have to be carried back aboard in tears. He blinds a one-eyed giant to escape his cave and earns the anger of the sea god for it. The witch Circe turns a scouting party of his men into pigs, then back again. He sails past the Sirens tied to the mast, gives up six of his crew to a six-headed monster to keep clear of the whirlpool across the strait, and spends seven years on the island of a nymph who will not let him go.
Back on Ithaca, his wife Penelope has been waiting twenty years, weaving by day and unpicking her work by night to put off a hall full of suitors who want her husband's throne. Their son Telemachus, a baby when Odysseus left, sets out to find some news of his father. The story circles home, as it always has, to a beggar at the palace door and a bow that only one man can string.
Turney's adaptation keeps to Homer's events, told with a light enough touch that the giant's cave and the hall full of suitors pass without a jolt. It is a good way in for anyone who has meant to read the Odyssey and never got past the first book, and a soft return for anyone who knows it well.
Thomas Jones reads at the pace of a ship under sail. The wine-dark sea, the long calm years on Calypso's island, and the loom in Penelope's hall are all good places to slip below the surface of the story.
