What the Mythological Tradition Preserves and What the Novelist Discovers Beneath It. There is a kind of silence in ancient sources that is not absence but compression. The authors who mention Atalanta—Hesiod in fragments, Pindar, Apollodorus, Diodorus Siculus, Pausanias, Ovid, Hyginus—do not bother to explain her. They assume their audience knows who she is. The […]
The question arrived before I wrote a single page of Asterios and the Labyrinth. I was standing by the reconstructed Tripartite Shrine at Knossos, watching other visitors move past without pausing, and I thought: I have to put a character here. He has to believe something about what he sees. And I do not know
Writing the Unknown: How Historical Fiction Reconstructs Ancient Greek Religion Read More »
On the distance between the Bronze Age world of Atalanta of the Wild and the Classical Greece readers bring to the page, and why that distance matters to the fiction. Most readers arrive at a Bronze Age novel carrying Greece with them—the Greece of the Parthenon, of the city-state, of the agora, and of the
For those who wish to explore the relationship between Homer, the Bronze Age, and the archaeological record—and to understand why the distance between them matters to anyone who writes in that world. A historical novelist working in the Bronze Age Aegean faces a problem no amount of imagination alone can solve: the world he is
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On the distance between The Iliad and The Odyssey and what archaeology reveals—and why a historical novelist must navigate between them. Every reader who comes to Bronze Age historical fiction arrives carrying Homer. The wine-dark sea, the rage of Achilles, the cunning of Odysseus are the furniture of the Western imagination when it turns toward
I can offer no other explanation: I close my eyes and travel. The ancient Mediterranean worlds of the tales I write lie some 9,600 kilometers from my writing desk in Rio de Janeiro, and yet, in the solitude of the working hours—the cell phone on mute, the tropical city going about its business beyond the
Rio de Janeiro and the Bronze Age: Writing Ancient Worlds from a Modern City Read More »
I. Introduction The religion of the Late Bronze Age Aegean was not Olympian religion in an earlier form. It was something older and stranger: more local, more animistic, more deeply rooted in the agricultural rhythms of the land and the intimate realities of the household. The defined personalities we know from Homer, of gods with
A stylized, black-and-white vector image of the Minoan horns of consecration is the logo of ETHORN Publishing, the imprint under which I publish my historical fiction. It is also used in a more elaborate form as the topmost illustration of the colophon pages of my novels. The symbol has been part of my literary vision
What the Minoan Horns of Consecration Mean to Me Read More »
FEB 2026 Literary Titan Gold Book Award Winner Asterios and the Labyrinth follows Prince Asterios of Knossos as his father dies, political rivals rise against him, foreign powers threaten the island, and love pulls him in directions that the laws of his world barely allow. The story blends palace intrigue, war, prophecy, and a passionate
Asterios and the Labyrinth | Gold Book Award Winner, Reviewed by Literary Titan Read More »
Set on the island of Crete during the Minoan Bronze Age some 3,500 years ago, Asterios and the Labyrinth (Mythos of Knossos) by Edmond Thornfield is a tale of gods, kings, heroes, revolts, and magical powers. The Minoans, a wealthy people known for their farming and commerce, experienced some turbulence following the death of King
Asterios and the Labyrinth | Reviewed by Leonard Smuts for Readers’ Favorite Read More »
