Gods Behaving Badly By Marie Phillips Jonathan Cape £12.99
FT bookshop price: £10.39

Their powers diminished by anti-heroic, irreligious modernity, the Olympian gods now share a filthy north London house and fret away at low-rent jobs.

Dionysus is a heavy drinking DJ in his Bacchanalia nightclub, while huntress Artemis is a Hampstead dog-walker. Aphrodite is a sex-chat-line worker who slinks naked around the house.

In revenge for his turning a merchant banker into a tree, Aphrodite mischievously makes her insatiable nephew Apollo fall madly in love with a mortal: Alice, their self-effacing cleaner. Zeus promptly kills her.

Phillips riffs off the Orpheus legend with the catty antics of her incestuously dysfunctional commune of immortals. Witty and entertaining, Gods Behaving Badly is an auspicious debut that outrageously libels the classical pantheon.