The Leto Bundle

Features of The Leto Bundle

Product DescriptionA sensual, compelling new novel inspired by dramatic chronicles, contemporary events, and the tragic figure of a woman-goddess in permanent exileRoom XIX of the Museum of Albion doesn't usually have many visitors. But when a huge crowd of dispossessed immigrants and homeless gather to see a mummy that has recently been moved, political pressure mounts, and the curator must reveal the mystery behind the locked door. To the passionate young man who has adopted the mummy as a figurehead, the curator explains that the once secret exhibit is a bundle of rare objects and intriguing documents that tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman named Leto. Marina Warner's magical new novel weaves together the story of this ancient goddess and eternal refugee with the drama of the curator, her new friend, and the people whose lives will be transformed by The Leto Bundle.As Leto moves westward across the map from her first home, she slips through time, reappearing in different guises and ever on the run. She gives birth to twins during a far-off era of civil strife, shelters with wolves, stows away on a ship, works as a chambermaid in a war-torn city, and, in a bombing attack, saves her daughter but loses her son. The novel sweeps from mythological times to the Middle Ages, to Victorian Europe, and then to the present day, when Leto reappears, still searching, of course, for her long-lost son.The Leto Bundle retells the story of the eternal refugee in a magical modern novel of huge scope and imaginative force.From Publishers WeeklyProlific fiction and nonfiction writer Marina Warner draws on grand themes of history and belonging in her ambitious new novel, The Leto Bundle, in which a collection of cryptic documents and artifacts once belonging to Leto, a woman of the ancient Near East, is put on exhibit in present-day Europe and causes an unexpected stir. Kim McQuy, an idealistic schoolteacher, becomes obsessed with the idea of Leto and strikes up an odd working relationship with matter-of-fact museum curator Hortense Fernly. Warner's deft command of her material and her ability to create fully believable charactersmanages to both question and applaud the power of myth in modern society, and readers will be entranced with the magical pull of this well-told tale.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From BooklistLeto is a Titan. Leto, a mortal, is raped by Zeus and gives birth to twins who have no navels. Leto and her twins are rescued by a she-wolf. Another leap forward in time, and an archaeologist finds the Leto Bundle, a female mummy's stash. Leto and her twins are sold into slavery, then escape only to find themselves in the midst of a horrific modern war. Novelist Warner, also a cultural historian and author most recently of No Go the Bogeyman (1999), interleaves the spellbinding, time-warping tale of Leto--an ur-woman surviving brutality and deprivation, the mythic self-sacrificing mother, the perpetual unwanted refugee--into a shrewd contemporary plot anchored to a museum exhibit of the Leto Bundle. The display causes an uproar as Kim, a young man of uncertain origins, claims to be in touch with Leto, the goddess of everyone who's been driven from home. Drawing art historian Hortense and famed singer Gramercy into his cosmic quest, he hopes to establish a new secular church that will resolve ethnic and racial conflicts. A superb and cunning storyteller with the acumen of Atwood and Byatt, Warner, nimbly improvising on Woolf's Orlando, has created a prismatic epic of tremendous social resonance and emotional sounding. Donna SeamanCopyright American Library Association. All rights reservedReviewThe novel [of 2001] that most challenges the basic conventions of fiction is Marina Warner's The Leto Bundle . . . [it] has long stretches of sheer narrative bliss.--Edmund White, The Observer Review, Books of the YearThe Leto Bundle is not an historical novel in any conventi