The war is over. Troy has fallen. Everyone else is heading home.

Everyone except one man.

Odysseus just wants to get back to his wife, his son, and his little rocky island of Ithaca. It should be a few weeks' sailing. Instead, it takes him ten years.

Along the way there are monsters, witches, storms, shipwrecks, and gods who really can't decide whether they're helping him or ruining him. And back home in Ithaca, things aren't going well either — a house full of uninvited guests is eating him out of his kingdom, and they're all waiting for his wife to give up on him.

Can he make it home? And if he does, will there be anything left worth coming home to?

This is *The Odyssey* by Homer.

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I'm Roger Braveheart, and welcome along to *TWIG 74* — grab a cuppa, get comfy, and think of this as a free audiobook you can polish off in about an hour.

Here's the idea behind the channel. We take the great classics — the ones everybody's heard of but hardly anyone's actually read — and retell them properly, so you get the story, the drama and the feel of the original without wading through hundreds of pages.

So what you're about to hear is a summarised version. Homer's poem is enormous, and reading or listening to the whole thing would eat up many, many hours of your life. This one comes in at around sixty minutes, give or take — it depends on how long and how tangled the original book is. But don't worry, I've kept all the bits that matter. None of the good stuff gets left behind.

One more thing worth mentioning: this version comes straight from Homer's original poem. Not the movies, not the TV shows, not the tidied-up retellings floating about out there. A lot of those shuffle events around, smooth off Odysseus's rough edges, or quietly change big chunks of what actually happens — including the newest one, Christopher Nolan's film with Matt Damon. So if you've only ever seen a screen version, you might be in for a few surprises.

New episodes land at least once a week, on Sundays, so there's always something fresh waiting for you before the working week kicks in.

And if you fancy dropping me a line, the show's email is **twig74@mailo.com**. I genuinely love hearing from you — feedback, thoughts, or better still, suggestions for classics you'd like me to read on a future episode. Chances are, if you want to hear it, so does somebody else.

Right then. Get comfortable, picture a ship on a wide dark sea a very long way from home, and let's begin.