Book description
Robert Graves's controversial historical novel is a bold reworking of
the story of Christ. Here Jesus is not the son of God, but the result of
a secret marriage - the descendant of Herod and true King of the Jews.
Written from the perspective of a lowly official at the end of the first
century AD,
King Jesus
recounts Jesus's birth, youth, life as a charismatic 'wonder worker'
and the unorthodox, bitter nature of his death and resurrection.
Portraying Jesus not as divine but as a flawed human bent upon his own
doom, this retelling of the gospels is a compelling blend of research,
imagination and narrative power. Robert Graves was a poet, professor,
and the author of Goodbye to All That
(1929), a landmark anti-heroic memoir of life in the trenches during
World War I. He is even better known for his historical novels about the
Roman emperor Claudius: I, Claudius
(1934) and Claudius the God
(1935). Despite those successes, Graves was primarily a poet: he
published dozens of volumes of his verse during his life, and was
professor of poetry at Oxford from 1961-66. Graves lived most of his
adult life on the island of Majorca, at first with fellow poet Laura
Riding, and later with his second wife Beryl Hodge.
