Zusatztext The style as a whole posesses an often eerie earthiness... This is a novel that stands firmly on its own feet. Financial Times Review I think this quietly ambitious and beautifully achieved novel is one of the most convincing historical novels I have ever read. Hilary Mantel! author of Wolf Hall Annabel Lyon's Aristotle is the most fully realized historical character in contemporary fiction. The Golden Mean engenders in the reader the same helpless sensitivity to the ferocious beauty of the world that is Aristotle's disease. In this alarmingly confident and transporting debut novel! Lyon offers us that rarest of treats: a book about philosophy! about the power of ideas! that chortles and sings like an earthy romance. 2009 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Jury Marina Endicott! Miriam Toews! R. M. Vaughan I absolutely loved The Golden Mean . Annabel Lyon brings the philosophers and warriors! artists and whores! princes and slaves of ancient Macedonia alive! with warmth! wit! and poignancy. Impeccably researched and brilliantly told! this novel is utterly convincing. Marie Phillips! author of Gods Behaving Badly The Golden Mean ! so full of intellect! is a pleasure to read. If excellence is our standard! then this novel will certainly flourish. David Bergen! Scotiabank Giller Prizewinning author of The Time in Between and The Retreat An exhilarating book! both brilliant and profound. Annabel Lyon's spare! fluid! utterly convincing prose pulls us headlong into Aristotle's original mind. Only Lyon's great-hearted intelligence could have imagined and achieved the brave ambition of this book. Vital! ferocious! and true! The Golden Mean is an oracular vision of the past made present. Marina Endicott! author of Good to a Fault In Lyon's clever hands! more than two thousand years of difference are made to disappear and Aristotle feels as real and accessible as the man next door. With this powerful! readable act of the imagination! Annabel Lyon proves that she can go anywhere it pleases her to go. Fred Stenson! author of The Great Karoo "Lyon [has] established herself as this generation's answer to Alice Munro. A master of wordplay and storytelling! Lyon takes readers deep into the hearts and secret desires of her characters." The Vancouver Sun "A taut! polished novel that will hold your attention from start to finish. It is at times funny! thought-provoking! sensual and suspenseful." The Vancouver Sun "This is a wise and thoughtful book." The Giller Prize jury citation Informationen zum Autor ANNABEL LYON published her first book, Oxygen , a collection of stories, in 2000. The Best Thing for You , a collection of three novellas, followed in 2004. Her first novel, The Golden Mean , was published in 2009 and won the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Sweet Girl , a companion to The Golden Mean , was published in fall 2012. Imagining Ancient Women, the text of her Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, was published the same year. She won the Engel-Findley award for a body of work in 2015. Her latest novel, Consent , was published in fall 2020. A professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, she is also currently the Director of the School of Creative Writing. Klappentext NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist for the Giller Prize and Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction The startlingly original first novel--now the basis for the forthcoming Netflix series Alexander --by award-winning writer Annabel Lyon reimagining one of history's most intriguing relationships: that between legendary philosopher Aristotle and his most f...

Autorentext

ANNABEL LYON published her first book, Oxygen, a collection of stories, in 2000. The Best Thing for You, a collection of three novellas, followed in 2004. Her first novel, The Golden Mean, was published in 2009 and won the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The Sweet Girl, a companion to The Golden Mean, was published in fall 2012. Imagining Ancient Women, the text of her Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, was published the same year. She won the Engel-Findley award for a body of work in 2015. Her latest novel, Consent, was published in fall 2020. A professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, she is also currently the Director of the School of Creative Writing.

Klappentext

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Finalist for the Giller Prize and Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

The startlingly original first novel--now the basis for the forthcoming Netflix series Alexander--by award-winning writer Annabel Lyon reimagining one of history's most intriguing relationships: that between legendary philosopher Aristotle and his most famous pupil, the young Alexander the Great.**

342 BC: Aristotle is reluctant to set aside his own ambitions in order to tutor Alexander, the rebellious son of his boyhood friend Philip of Macedon. But the philosopher soon comes to realize that teaching this charming, surprising, sometimes horrifying teenager--heir to the Macedonian throne, forced onto the battlefield before his time--is a necessity amid the ever more sinister intrigues of Philip's court.

Told in the brilliantly rendered voice of Aristotle--keenly intelligent, often darkly funny--The Golden Mean brings ancient Greece to vivid life through the story of this remarkable friendship between two towering figures--innovator and conqueror--whose views of the world still resonate today.

Leseprobe
One

The rain falls in black cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey. On the ship she seemed comfortable enough, but this last overland stage is beyond all her experience and it shows. Her mare stumbles; she’s let the reins go loose again, allowing the animal to sleepwalk. She rides awkwardly, weighed down by her sodden finery. Earlier I suggested she remain on one of the carts but she resisted, such a rare occurrence that I smiled, and she, embarrassed, looked away. Callisthenes, my nephew, offered to walk the last distance, and with some difficulty we helped her onto his big bay. She clutched at the reins the first time the animal shifted beneath her.

“Are you steady?” I asked, as around us the caravan began to move.

“Of course.”

Touching. Men are good with horses where I come from, where we’re returning now, and she knows it. I spent yesterday on the carts myself so I could write, though now I ride bareback, in the manner of my countrymen, a ball­busting proposition for someone who’s been sedentary as long as I have. You can’t stay on a cart while a woman rides, though; and it occurs to me now that this was her intention.

I hardly noticed her at first, a pretty, vacant-eyed girl on the fringes of Hermias’ s menagerie. Five years ago, now. Atarneus was a long way from Athens, across the big sea, snug to the flank of the Persian Empire. Daughter, niece, ward, concubine – the truth slipped like silk.

“You like her,” Hermias said. “I see the way you look at her.” Fat, sly, rumoured a money­changer in his youth, later a butcher and a mercenary; a eunuch, now, supposedly, and a rich man. A politician, too, holding a stubborn satrapy against the barbarians: Hermias of Atarneus. “Bring me my thinkers!” he used to shout. “Great men surround themselves with thinkers! I wish to be surrounded!” And he would laugh and slap at himself while the girl Pythias watched without seeming to blink quite often enough. She became a gift, one of many, for I was a favourite. On our wedding night she arrayed herself …