The story of the war at Troy, as Homer wrote it in the Iliad and as I re-imagine it in Achilles: A Love Story tells of a violent clash of cultures that remains for us even now a dreadful
exemplar of the horrors of war and the folly of those who engage in it. But as the ancients all knew, the story of the war at Troy was also a tale of love between men-of the devotion of
Achilles, unrivalled hero, terrible warrior, and so it is said in legend, the most beautiful man in the world, to another great warrior, the handsome Patroclus. Their names resound in the
catalogue both of heroes and of lovers; their story remains one of the greatest, most emblematic, and earliest gay love stories ever told. In the Iliad Homer also tantalizingly hints at another
love story, the love of Antilochus, son of King Nestor and Prince of Pylos, for Achilles. In Achilles: A Love Story I tell the story of Antilochus and Achilles through Antilochus' point of view
and in his first person voice, fleshing out what Homer only hints at and inventing what he does not, as it plays out against the background of the last year of the Trojan war. Achilles: A Love
Story creates the story of Antilochus and Achilles, and one both epic and tragic, that has been told, so far as I know by no other writer.
