The books
The Odyssey They Never Told You
A journey through Homer’s poem with its women at the center
The illustrated edition: 35 museum plates in full color, Ortelius’s map of 1597, and Odysseus’s letter to Penelope.
- Illustrated hardcover · premium color$59.9935 plates · dedication page
- Illustrated paperback · color$29.9935 plates in color
- eBook (Kindle) · illustrated edition35 plates in color
Prices as seen on Amazon on 29 September 2026. The price on Amazon is the one that applies.
Every claim carries its book and line.
How this book works
Quick quiz. No grade, no pressure.
The Odyssey is the story of: (a) a hero’s awesome adventures with monsters; (b) a guy who takes ten years to get home from a war; (c) a woman running a hostile takeover defense for two decades with no army, no husband, and no legal rights; (d) a house full of enslaved women, one of whom will end up deciding the climax of the whole poem.
The passage continues in the book
And this is how every claim is checked:
Tradition calls Book 22 “the triumph of Odysseus” and tends to fast-forward through its final third.
ILLUSTRATED HARDCOVER EDITION. 35 museum plates in full color, printed in KDP premium color ink. Ortelius's map of 1597. A dedication page for the copy. The book you give when you do not want to come up short.
Some books are read and some are given. This one was made for both: to be read with a pencil at hand, and to be put in the hands of someone who argues well.
What this edition has and no other does
· 35 complete plates, in color. Waterhouse, Turner, Böcklin, Wright of Derby, Guérin, Primaticcio, Kauffmann, Lairesse. Works from open-access museum collections, reproduced whole, never cropped, each with a caption: what the painter chose to show and what he chose to leave out.
· Premium color printing, the highest grade Amazon's press offers. It is the only ink this hardcover is made with; that is why it costs what it costs.
· Abraham Ortelius's map (1597) across two pages as you open the book: the voyage of Ulysses as the first modern atlas drew it.
· A dedication page: "This copy is for…", left blank on purpose. Only the hardcover has it.
· A code at the end that opens a gift page for whoever receives the book.
What is inside, besides the paintings
It opens with a letter: the one Odysseus writes Penelope on the anniversary, twenty years on. Homer never wrote it; it is here, whole, before the first chapter, and it says the things that are hard to say to someone's face.
Then fifteen readings of the Odyssey, checked line by line against the Greek. Who tells whom to be quiet on the stairs in Book 1, and the single word that changes twenty books later. How many times the twelve enslaved women are named before they are hanged. What Penelope does with a bed to disarm a man who out-talked a Cyclops and a goddess. No paraphrase: book, line, and the two passages set side by side. You give the verdict.
And at the close, the table talk: questions with no answer key, for a book club, two readers, or a long evening.
Who it is for
For the collector of illustrated editions who can tell a full plate from a vignette. For anyone who has to give a gift and wants it to have weight. For the reader who met the Odyssey years ago and suspects they were told half of it.
Also available as a lighter color paperback, for the reader keeping it; and as an eBook.
Ariadna Kastri reads the old poems where nobody looks: at the margin, at the servant, at the sentence the hero does not finish.
Not to Ithaca, not to the voyage: to her.
Book one of the series. Each volume stands on its own.
