Apollo. The Olympus Cycle, #8

Born into light on a wandering island in the sea, Apollo arrived in the world already fully himself - the archer, the musician, the oracle, the healer. But the god of light has always known darkness better than his radiance suggests. APOLLO tells the full story of the most luminous of the Olympians: from the killing of the Python at Delphi and the negotiation with Hermes that gave him the lyre, to the love that ended with a flower pressed from blood, to the gift he gave Cassandra and then made useless, to the year he spent as a mortal herdsman learning what it actually cost to live a mortal life.
It tells the story of Asclepius, his son, whose excellence exceeded the boundary Apollo had not thought to name - and what happened when Zeus noticed. He was the god of precision, of the clearly stated, of the light that shows what is there. He believed that clarity was worth pursuing even when what became clear was terrible. He applied this belief to himself as much as to anything else, which made him, of all the Olympians, the one least able to look away from his own failures.
A literary mythology of light and its limits - intimate, exacting, and honest about the cost of being the god who cannot lie. He is the light that does not lie. It has cost him everything. Apollo - archer, musician, oracle, healer - arrived in the world already certain of what he was. What the centuries taught him was what his certainty could not protect: the love that died on a discus throw, the prophetess whose gift he poisoned with his anger, the son whose excellence he praised too well and too completely.
He could not lie. He could not unsay. He could not look away. APOLLO is the story of the most radiant of the gods - found not in his brightness but in the shadows that brightness makes, in everything he saw clearly and could not save.