The Nature of Things

The Greek gods of Olympus are alive in the twenty-first century but they are not well. Their powers are waning because nobody believes in them any more. They all live together in a cramped rat and roach-infested town house in London and they are seriously getting on each other's nerves. Marie Phillips has imagined a world in which the Greek gods retain their essential characters but must find ways of getting along in a world of humans. Thus, Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, is a telephone sex worker, when she isn't getting it on with her fellow gods - or, sometimes,  while  she's getting it on with her fellow gods. (She has mastered multi-tasking.) Apollo, god of the sun, is a television psychic, and his sister, Artemis, the goddess of hunting, is a professional dog walker.  The house where the gods all live is slowly succumbing to rot and it is filthy because nobody ever cleans. Artemis decides to do something at least about the filth problem and she hires a cleaner nam...