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A startlingly original first novel by “this generation’s answer to Alice Munro” (The Vancouver Sun)—a bold reimagining of one of history’s most intriguing relationships: between legendary philosopher Aristotle and his most famous pupil, the young Alexander the Great.
342 BC: Aristotle is reluctant to set aside his own ambitions in order to tutor Alexander, the rebellious son of his boyhood friend Philip of Macedon. But the philosopher soon comes to realize that teaching this charming, surprising, sometimes horrifying teenager—heir to the Macedonian throne, forced onto the battlefield before his time—is a necessity amid the ever more sinister intrigues of Philip’s court.
Told in the brilliantly rendered voice of Aristotle—keenly intelligent, often darkly funny—The Golden Mean brings ancient Greece to vivid life via the story of this remarkable friendship between two towering figures, innovator and conqueror, whose views of the world still resonate today.
Annabel Lyon's first book of fiction, the short story collection Oxygen, was published to wide acclaim, and was nominated for the Danuta Gleed award. Her second collection, The Best Thing for You (novellas), was nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the City of Vancouver Book Award. The Golden Mean is a Canadian best-seller. It was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and won the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize. It has also been short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Lyon's short fiction has appeared in Toronto Life, the Journey Prize anthology, and the Harvard Review. She lives in New Westminster, British Columbia, with her husband and two children.
To read or listen to Alan Cheuse's NPR review of The Golden Mean, in which he refers to the book as "splendidly intelligent and entertaining," click here.
