The World's Desire

The World's Desire is a classic fantasy novel first published in 1890 and written by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang. Its importance was recognized in its later revival in paperback by Ballantine Books as the fortieth volume of the celebrated Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in January, 1972.

The World's Desire is the story of the hero Odysseus, mainly referred to as "the Wanderer" for the bulk of the novel. Odysseus returns home to Ithaca after his second, unsung journey. He is hoping to find a "home at peace, wife dear and true and his son worthy of him". Unfortunately, he does not find any of the three, instead his home is ravaged by a plague and his wife Penelope has been slain. As he grieves, he is visited by an old flame, Helen of Troy, for whom the novel is named. Helen leads him to equip himself with the Bow of Eurytus and embark on his last journey. This is an exhausting journey in which he encounters a Pharaoh who is wed to a murderess beauty, a holy and helpful priest, and his own fate.

Read more about The World's Desire:  Book I, Book II, Book III, Characters, Concept and Creation, Collaboration, Style, Adventure Romance, Imperial Gothic, Reception, Feminist Interpretations, Sexual Difference, References

Famous quotes containing the words the world, world and/or desire:

    It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it.
    Lucy Stone (1818–1893)

    Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.
    Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)

    I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)