Last week I was thrilled to receive an advance copy of a book I’ve been looking forward to for years – and I’m glad to report that it didn’t disappoint!

You are Odysseus isn’t a regular book, although it comes in book form (either as a print book or as an ebook). It’s a Choose Your Own Adventure book. At the start you’re Odysseus, on the verge of leaving Troy and heading home, and as the story progresses you have to make choices. Maybe you’ll appease your men by attacking the people you meet along the way; or maybe you’ll honour the gods at every step. Maybe your search for personal kleos will drive you to take dangerous risks; or maybe your desire to make it home safely will win out. You get to choose: you can follow in the Homeric Odysseus’ footsteps, or explore what might happen if he’d taken a different path.

I remember reading all of the Fighting Fantasy Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid in the 1980s. I also remember cheating a lot. My choices always seemed to lead me to a horrible death (usually in a dark hole, for some reason), so I’d always mark my last choice with my finger so that I could flip back and choose a less immediately fatal path. I came to the conclusion, at the age of 9, that I wasn’t cut out to be a monster-battling hero.

It’s nice to know that some things don’t change. I’ve managed to meet multiple sticky ends as Odysseus in the last week, through making choices that I thought were the ‘right’ ones – and every single time it’s caught me by surprise. Don’t ever go on a quest with me – you won’t make it!

Apart from being great fun (which it is), the strength of this book is the superb writing. Laura Jenkinson-Brown (of GreekMythComix fame) is an award-winning teacher and artist who knows the Odyssey inside out, and it shows. The parts of the story derived from Homer are packed with rich descriptions and beautiful Homeric language, and  the parts which move away from the Odyssey are just as full of Homeric details and nods to other epics. If you’re alert (and if you drift far enough away from the OG Odysseus’ choices), you can pick up little touches from Virgil and Euripides, as well as numerous other Easter eggs from the Epic Cycle and Bronze Age history, all wrapped up in the style of the Odyssey. It’s a treasure trove of mythological treats!

I’ve been rooting for this project for years, ever since I first heard about it, because I think it’s such a brilliant way of upending our reading of the Odyssey and really thinking about how character-driven the story is. Whether you love Odysseus or hate him, this book forces you to confront the ways in which his choices are shaped by his world-view, by the society he lives in, and by his understanding of what makes a hero.

You are Odysseus is a huge achievement – quite literally! At 700 sections and 200,000 words, it’s a very large book – and because it has so many pathways through it, you can play it over and over again, finding new things (or in my case new disasters) each time. It’s an extraordinary book, and deserves to be the biggest mythology hit of the year.

You are Odysseus will be published by Blackboard fiction on 25th September 2025, in EPUB and paperback formats, and is available now for pre-order from your bookshop of choice.