I picked up Delphi thinking it was going to be one of the popular Greek myth feminist retelling stories that I like, but found a thoughtful novel about the coronavirus pandemic instead, lightly sprinkled with classical references. I was definitely not disappointed.

Delphi is a surprisingly enjoyable read that precisely captures the feeling of being trapped on an endless treadmill and wanting to break free and just make a change. It really struck a chord with this forty-something woman reader.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

This is not so much a novel as a diary of living through the first 2 years of COVID. The book is English and the main character has a son and a flaky husband, but it reflects the universality of the (middle class) COVID experience. It is a rather brilliant book, but has led me down a contemplative memory journey of a weird and disturbing time. COVID is not just a thing that is happening in this book , it is the plot - as far as this book has a plot.

It's the sort of book that doesn't benefit from a star rating - the book is painful and uncomfortable and rings so true, but does that make it a good book? For me it was a worthy read, and it has allowed me to think about my feelings about that time, which just spools on and on.

Don't read this if you don't want to re-immerse yourself in that strangest of times.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, who gave me an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a me book. With the mythology, the autofiction vibes, and the really good writing, it was a book that I really enjoyed. Even though it was written in a fragmentary style which usually isn’t something I enjoy, reading this might have swayed me into reading more books like this. A very 2020-2021 book, normally I’m skeptical of, but this was done so well. The ending is the only thing that threw me a bit, and I’m still not sure about. But other than that, amazing! Obsessed!

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin UK for sending me an advanced copy

I'm not sure what to say about this book. I didn't hate it but I didn't love it. The writing was great but it just didn't flow for me. I had no idea what to expect having never read anything from this author or of this genre. Overall I'd say it was a good book and I can see many people loved it so obviously its just not my cup of tea. I'm glad i got to read it though.

Well I wasn’t expecting that ! I completely judged a book by its cover and assumed that this would be a ‘so-so’ kind of book, assuming it to probably be a historical/ mythology book but was not expecting the modern day family I discovered who are trying to control the chaotic and messy business of living through a pandemic.

It’s contemporary and I think will speak to everyone in a very real way with each reader recognising something about themselves through the characters but this is a hard book to review as I really don’t want to give away any spoilers.

The writing is bright , engaging and this is very easy to read . The perfect book for laying in the sun , glass of wine in hand and devouring every page.

"Delphi" presents the experience of the pandemic through the ancient Greek mythology lenses and through the surreal in itself act of prophecy; an overall exciting read.

This book has me confused in all the best ways, it was absolute chaos -which is exactly what the author was writing about. The pandemic. Working from home, being locked up with the same people for days, weeks and months at a time with no break. Ghosts towns, supermarket brawls. The world fell into utter chaos when the pandemic hit and this book captured that beautifully. I enjoyed the references and metaphors to Ancient Greece littered throughout the book, but I was going on the assumption that it would be more of a mythological book than a book about 2020. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed it!

Utterly pointless. By the end I was desperate to finish it. A lockdown novel of the worst most unimaginable qualities: recounting. This is a 200-pager recounting 2020 and the emergence of Covid-19. Pollard does nothing interesting with it. There's a lot of stuff about Greek tragedies thrown in but this does nothing for the narrative. It goes through everything, Covid-19, the different lockdowns, the tiers, the Rule of Six, Trump, the Capitol attack, the murder of Sarah Everard, everything awful that has happened over the last few years pointlessly retold through a boring narrator. Then the ending is depressing and unfruitful. Maybe I'll add some quotes to prove my attack tomorrow if I can bear to face them again. This is published next month, on the 28th of July. Thanks to the Penguin imprint Fig Tree for the advance review copy.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4793890189

I have recently been swept up in Greek Mythology re-telling’s and so I was really excited to read more from this debut novel. What I found was totally unexpected. The novel centres around an unnamed female narrator who is a classics academic researching ideas of prophecy amidst the Covid-19 pandemic. Whilst engaging with all the familiar characters from Greek myth: Zeus, The Furies, Helen, Cassandra tied up amongst them was an exploration of a more recent event in the reader’s consciousness and one that defied any sense of prophecy.
Aside from Sarah Water’s text The Fell, I had yet to read a novel that had dealt with the pandemic in any way and I quickly found myself experiencing a sense of déjà vu but also trepidation and unease. The narrator is trying to research her book, look after her young son who is himself experiencing mental trauma and maintain a relationship with her husband. All the characters are struggling to compute the lockdown, the restrictions, the news and their uncertainty and buckling felt all too familiar in a world that is still very much living through the effects of an event that has been unparalleled in recent human history.
I feel I may have got more out of this if I had a clearer working knowledge of all the references but the novel has given me lots of places to research and look up and so it may benefit from a second reading. However, that is not to say that I did not enjoy it and there were moments that were deeply melancholy but also darkly comic. Irritated by her husband ‘working’ in the office all the time, a consequence being he rarely gets involved with domestic duties she fiercely exclaims to the reader, ‘the snakes in my hair hiss at him to fuck off’ which felt like a comment on women taking on a lot of the burden of responsibility for childcare and household tasks but also the idea of being blamed and typecast as unhinged being an age old concept.
The relationship and anxiety the narrator holds for her son was both moving and poignant. Fears over how the next generation will respond and the impact this event had on them is very much at the fore of the book, ‘He was so beautiful and vulnerable it was intolerable’ The idea that the perpetual immediacy of loved ones but also the separateness of the lives being lived and the isolation it breeds was impactful and effective. How we respond to trauma and the particular world trauma of Covid-19 is something that I am sure will be explored for many more years to come.

I liked the idea of this. Oracles and prophecies and predictions but it’s a normal family during the pandemic. It just wasn’t for me though. I don’t think I really get the point of it. It was just our mc, who I’m pretty sure we don’t know the name of, having rambling thoughts for 200 pages, going through the pandemic with her husband and child. And that’s it?

There were a few interesting points made and I feel a lot of us would resonate with what she was going through, but otherwise it was pretty boring.

The ending was something. This big super scary thing happened all of a sudden then the book ended and it felt unfinished. But maybe that’s a commentary on life and our lives in the pandemic - Christ who knows

The Covid-pandemic has really started to impact literature - and I'm glad for it. I think lots of people read to find themselves, or others, in fiction, and this book is a beautiful example of that. It is both familiar and strange, and with great, realistic characters.

The book focuses on our unnamed main character's life and thoughts, and very rarely on her feelings, during the pandemic, from the beginning in 2020 to some time in 2021 (if I remember correctly).

I'm very confused by this one. A lot of the chapters have a lot of info-dumping. Some don't seem to add anything to the story. But there isn't really a plot at all, the characters are not portrayed very well, and I cannot for the life of me describe one of them (not even the Main Character). It doesn't even focus on their relationships. Everything we see is through the eyes of the MC and she is oblivious to A LOT of stuff going on around her (mostly related to her son).

The writing style is not outstanding. On the first page of the book the word future is used 7 times.

There are 2 very questionable quotes, and I don't know if it's the MC thinking this way or the author, so I'm just going to leave them here:
- "Is there anything worse than a man in a dressing gown? Thin hairy calves poking out. I have to spend the rest of my life with this". The MC is referring to her husband here.
- During the summer of 2020 she states this about a friend "They say they haven’t left the house since March, which actually sounds to me like it’s becoming a mental health issue […]".

Also there's this one time when the MC mentioned the author while doing some research: "[…] in the poet Clare Pollard’s translation […]".

All in all, this book is not a memorable one at all, at least for me.

It is very easy to read though. If you find it easy to read about the pandemic, that is.

I liked how the chapter headings were ways of predicting the future/searching for answers- it linked very well to the title. I found the main character was annoying at times- they were very into predicting the future but never used any of the results to their advantage; just ignored it for the main part. Overall the book was a 3/5

I requested Delphi on NetGalley largely based on the short description and the cover. I sort of expected a retelling of Greek mythology through a contemporary feminist lens, and while those elements are all present, I was pleasantly surprised to find that this short novel was more akin to the work of Jenny Offill, Melissa Broder and even Deborah Levy.

Clare Pollard said "Delphi was written very quickly, in a kind of fever, largely this spring once my children’s homeschooling ended—as if telling a story were the only way I could process the chaos of this last year," and this is certainly evident as a reader. After Emily St John Mandel's excellent Sea of Tranquility, I wasn't sure if I wanted to consume more pandemic-related fiction, but the immediacy of this work results in a compelling relatability. Pollard's easy and accessible writing, and the structure of short chapters each relating in some way to a different form of prophecy, make a speedy page-turner.

Clare Pollard has found an intelligent, witty and sometimes uncomfortably relatable way to tease out the experiences of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns, with a poignant link to the way humanity has tried to predict and control their lives among the chaos of reality since the times of Ancient Greece.

COVID-19 hits London. A classics academic, when the family trip to Delphi is cancelled, becomes obsessed with learning the future. As the pandemic spreads, her husband Jason steadily ignores her and drinks more, while their only child grapples with severe asthma and deteriorating mental health.

I have never read anything quite like this before and I loved it. The short chapters punctuated with sharp observations on human behavior are reminiscent of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. The writing is pithy and voluptuous in turn (Pollard is a poet and this is her debut novel). The many references to Greek mythology, to writers (both modern and in antiquity) and to modern philosophy are fascinating.

In the future, this book will be read as a chronicle of how a middle-class family coped--and did not cope--with lockdown. Each chapter is titled after a different form of prophesy, from reading bloody entrails to the contemporary scanning of social media. It's an exploration of how we humans try to deal with uncertainty, with loss, with change. It's a quiet gem of a book and I urge you to read it.

I was offered this book as an ARC via NetGalley. I liked the idea of using the seeming infinite array of methods to predict the future using every day signs. Clare Pollard makes it very clear from the outset that "[a]ll characters in this novel are fictitious" and reiterates this at the end. On reflection, I think it would have made more engaging material if they had been based on true diary entries. Somehow, by trying to make the Covid experience universal, the author has missed the mark slightly. This novel, for me, mostly read as a recap of 'The Covid Years' by including all the main news highlights here in the UK. Why do I say that the author may have missed the mark then? I fear that this novel will date very quickly with an abundance of references to TV shows that aired etc. I struggle to see that those who lived through it will gain much insight as despite being written in the first person I didn't really engage with the main character. By the time that children are old enough to want to read an adult's perspective on the time, they will probably spend a significant amount of time looking up (what by then will be) obscure references to media of the era. It also lacks the universality by focusing so heavily on a middle-class, white UK experience.

The following may be an unfair criticism but I seem to have read a number of novels recently that center around the perspective of academics, can fictitious characters no longer hold other jobs?

Unlike anything I have read before, I really enjoyed it. Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Delphi is about a woman fixated on prophecies throughout the covid lockdown(s). We never learn her name, but she’s a middle aged Classics lecturer living with her husband and son. Whilst her husband struggles with alcoholism and son with various allergies and conditions as well as the isolation of lockdown, our narrator seems increasingly consumed by prophecies and the future.

It’s well written, engaging and a different angle on writing about covid. But for me it was almost too soon and I found such a vivid re-telling of the pandemic pretty anxiety inducing.

not a myth retelling but a diary style story of the pandemic and lockdown using mythological themes and prophecies as a framing i studied classics myself so i understood at lot of the references and it was clever how it weaved to together and how it intertwined mythological settings with the events of the lockdown and the rise of covid and the surreal nature of 2020 was captured i dont think i wouldve read a straight story of the pandemic but i enjoyed how this was handled

Pollard stream of flowing commentary was quite brilliant. She mixes classical thoughts, Greek myths and everyday life under covid with ease and intelligence.

She explores past, present and future with an emphasis on divination, all types and methods and further more examines our need for it. Why we need to know, to feel safe. Why we've replaced religion with social media with it's constant attention and instructions. Although we might complain of big brother watching us, do we secretly love having someone watching us - selfie anyone?