Bloomsbury presents The Odyssey of Phoebe Quilliam by Annelise Gray, read by Kerry Wotton.
A mythical timeslip story about family, love, loss and memory, with an epic sea voyage at its heart, inspired by the legend of Odysseus.
Phoebe dreams of becoming an artist like her grandmother, Cass, a brilliant storyteller who has passed on her love of Greek myths to Phoebe. But Cass is disappearing before Phoebe's eyes, lost to a cruel illness that is destroying her memory. When Phoebe ruins Cass's seascape inspired by childhood holidays on the Greek island of Ithaca, she is mysteriously swept away to a fantasy world that resembles her favourite myth of all - The Odyssey.
There Phoebe is caught up in a young boy's mission to find his long-lost father - a shipbuilder to King Odysseus, last seen going off to fight in the Trojan War - and faces an epic quest of her own. To seek the shape-shifting monster whose ravenous and growing power may hold the key to Phoebe fighting her own demons. Only by defeating the monster and facing her fears, will she have any hope of finding her way home and back to Cass.

Portrait

Annelise Gray was born in Bermuda and moved to the UK as a child. She grew up riding horses and dreaming of becoming a writer. After gaining a PhD in Classics from Cambridge, she worked as a researcher for authors and TV companies on topics as varied as Helen of Troy, Russian princesses and the history of labradors. She's previously published a history of the women of the Roman Empire and a crime novel set in the Roman Republic. Annelise's debut children's novel, Circus Maximus: Race to the Death, was published by Zephyr in 2021 and Rivals on the Track in 2022. Annelise lives with her husband in Dorset where she teaches Latin. annelisegray.co.uk Twitter: @AnneliseGray