Aesop never intended his work to be anything but bawdy, savage, witty, scatological and fickle but these tales also have at their heart two realities of life, the exercise of power and the lot of the powerless. In this stunning new edition, the words of Carlo Gébler and Gavin Weston’s beautiful illustrations strip all judgement away to reveal the central truths: we are all a bit gullible, often foolish and forever hopelessly optimistic.

Readers might relate to the god who plays games, to the slave with no control, the fierce animals who kill or even the weaker creatures who are butchered. In retelling Aesop’s famous fables for the twenty-first century, Gébler encourages us to look behind the violence and the moral platitudes for what is really going on, bringing us a dark, realistic and compulsively readable survival guide for our troubled world.