The Last World: Christoph Ransmayr

Cotta, a young Roman, sets out in search of the banished poet Ovid and his last greatest work, Metamorphoses. In the town of Tomi on the shores of the Black Sea, he discovers a strange and ominous world, suffused in and dominated by Ovidian mythology, a world where ancient Rome meets the twentieth century - a world of decay on the brink of collapse. The Metamorphoses have undergone a macabre and disturbing transmutation, literally metamorphosed into a thousand fragmented clues - found in the harsh, eerie landscape, in the bizarre fortunes of the people of Tomi, in extraordinary events where the bounds of reality and dream merge inextricably. As Cotta pieces together the evidence and dramatic, bewitching story emerges: a political and cultural fable about the end of time; the last world.