The Laughter of Aphrodite: A Novel about Sappho of Lesbos

Best-selling classicist Peter Green recreates the life and times of the Greek lyric poet Sappho in this beautifully conceived, sharply detailed work of historical imagination. We meet Sappho at the age of fifty, when she is shaken by her fatal and final love affair with Phaon. She narrates her own story from the vantage point of self-questioning middle age, and her candid meditations make intimate, engrossing reading.

Only fragments of Sappho's poetry survive. In imagining Sappho's life Gree...