Home at last, Odysseus must use every trick he knows to win back his throne.
 

    The story of Odysseus and his return home from Troy is over three thousand years old. Homer’s epic poem has been translated hundreds of times, put into prose, made into movies and inspired artists from Tennyson to the Coen Brothers, but no book or movie has told the story behind the legend. What was Odysseus like as a man, his fears and doubts, and how did the mind of one of the cleverest Greek heroes really work?

Set in 1214 BC in Ancient Greece, the story is a behind-the-scenes retelling of the epic tale of Odysseus and his return home to Ithaca after eighteen years of war and wandering.

This is the story of the Beggar King—the account of an all-too-human man who pleads with the gods, lies and schemes, plots and fights in a desperate attempt to reclaim all that he has lost. Yet beneath the action, the Beggar King is about the nobleness of the human soul, about a man’s great love for a woman and his search for forgiveness. It is, after the smoke clears and the clash of swords fades, the story of spiritual redemption.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A husband and father of two, the author is a graduate of Cal Berkeley and has lived most of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. His passion for Ancient Greece and, in particular, the myth of Odysseus started as a child in elementary school. Over the years he has spent hours reading and re-reading Homer’s The Odyssey and The Illiad as well as researching the Homeric period of Greek history. Following this passion, as Joseph Campbell put it, has opened doors where one would not have thought there would be doors. It has brought the author to a door all his own.