Ulysses

A remarkable conflation of mythology, symbolism, philosophy, social realism and humanity, Ulysses is a tale of events over the course of a single day (16 June 1904) in Dublin as encountered by its protagonists—Leopold Bloom, a quiet middle-aged man devoted to his wife Molly, and the arrogant young intellectual, Stephen Dedalus. Both Bloom and Stephen, while wandering the streets of Dublin, one to run errands and the other to meet his day’s chores, cross each other a number of times. Lost in a stream of multitudinous thoughts—from midwives, cockle-pickers and boulders to birth, death and human frailty—the two do not meet until much later, only to know that Stephen seeks a father and Bloom a son. Does their search for companionship and belonging end when Bloom invites Stephen to live with him? Considered Joyce’s seminal work, this book breaks all boundaries of literary genre and form, and becomes, in Anthony Burgess’s words, ‘inimitable, and also possibly mad’.