Lawrence Norfolk
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Lawrence Norfolk
The story begins in the ancient Greece of myth, where King Meleager of Kalydon has assembled the sixty greatest hunters—and one huntress, Atalanta—to rid his realm of the supernatural boar sent by the vengeful goddess Artemis to lay waste to his lands. But as the hunters bear down upon their prey a darker tale unfolds, of treachery and destructive love. It is a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of the Second World War, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer.
Solomon Memel, a young Jewish Romanian refugee who was rescued by resistance fighters and subsequently joined them in their chase, will be inspired by the experience to write a poem, titled “Die Keilerjagd”, or “The Boar Hunt”, which mixes the elements of the mythical hunt with the historical pursuit of S.S. field commandant Heinrich Eberhardt. The partisans, from the charismatic leader Xanthos to the dangerous beauty Theyella, will themselves become part of modern mythos, as the poem becomes an international sensation. But the truth of what happened…
The Pope's Rhinoceros: A Novel
Lawrence Norfolk
The Pope’s Rhinoceros is a vivid, antic, and picaresque novel spun around one of history’s most bizarre chapters: the sixteenth-century attempt to procure a rhinoceros as a bribe for Pope Leo X. In February 1516, a Portuguese ship sank off the coast of Italy. The Nostra Señora de Ajuda had sailed fourteen thousand miles from the Indian kingdom of Gujarat. Her mission: to bribe the “pleasure-loving Pope” into favoring expansionist Portugal over her rival Spain with the most exotic and least likely of gifts—a living rhinoceros. Moving from the herring colonies of the Baltic Sea to the West African rain forest, with a cast of characters including an order of reclusive monks and Rome’s corrupt cardinals, courtesans, ambassadors, and nobles, The Pope’s Rhinoceros is at once a fantastic adventure tale and a portrait of an age rushing headlong to its crisis.
