Author Talk with Terence Hawkins: The Rage of Achilles

Please join us for an Author Talk with Terence Hawkins, who will speak on January 11 from 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. about his first novel, The Rage of Achilles, first published in 2009 and republished in 2021.

In The Rage of Achilles, Terence Hawkins recounts the “Iliad” as a novel and imagines a Trojan War that really happened. Though he adopts Homer’s characters, those fabled warriors are no more noble than the scared, tired grunts they command, exhausted and bitter after ten years of brutal Bronze Age warfare. And however savage the fighting, over all hangs the terrible truth that the objective of combat is not glory, but the enslavement of the defeated.

His realism extends to the gods themselves. Informed by Julian Jaynes’ groundbreaking theory of the bicameral mind, The Rage of Achilles takes place in a world in which the modern human consciousness struggles painfully to be born. The gods are only the hallucinations of men and women desperate to be told what to do in a terrifying and confusing world.

Told in taut, elegant prose that captures both the Homeric lyric and military grit, The Rage of Achilles is a fast-moving take on literature’s foundational epic.

In addition to historical fiction, Hawkins has written American Neolithic and the collection Turing’s Graveyard. Terence Hawkins has served as the editor of Blue Mountain Review, and All Things Tudor, and is now the director of the Company of Writers. He lives in Connecticut.

Elm Street Books will be selling copies of the books and Terence Hawkins will be signing books after the talk. A portion of the proceeds goes to Wilton Library.

The media sponsor of our author talks is GOOD Morning Wilton.

Registration is required. To register and see more information, visit the Wilton Library website.