Homer's odyssey ... in his wife's words

What if Penelope got to tell the story?

What if, instead of being centered on the travails and triumphs of the wily husband, Homer's "Odyssey" was built around the experiences of the faithful wife?

What would happen if the blind Greek bard himself were ushered offstage and replaced by, say, the sharp-eyed Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood?

Actually, we know the answer to this.

We'd get Atwood's new book, "The Penelopiad," (Canongate, 199 pp., $18) part of an ambitious series of re-imagined myths being released simultaneously by more than 30 publishers worldwide.

We'd get the harrowing tale of our heroine's childhood with her homicidal dad, which Atwood's Penelope tells in the first person. "You have to admit there was something humorous," she writes, "about a father who'd once tossed his own child into the sea capering down the road after that very child and calling, 'Stay with me!' "

We'd get a chapter called "Helen Ruins My Life," about the selfish twit who caused the Trojan War. And we'd get a new take on Odysseus' much-delayed return from that war, disguised as a dirty beggar, to confront a houseful of suitors paying rowdy court to his wife.

In Atwood's version, Penelope sees right through his disguise but doesn't let on. "It's always an imprudence," she explains, "to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness."

But we wouldn't just get Penelope's point of view.

We'd also hear from the 12 maids Odysseus summarily executes for the sin of sleeping with the suitors.

Atwood first took note of this casual brutality when her parents gave her "The Odyssey" for Christmas at age 15. "The maids being hanged bothered me," she says. "It seemed very excessive." She calls the hangings "honor killings," designed to show that Odysseus was back in charge, and her book gives the wronged women voice as a mournful, accusing chorus.

The myth series is the brainchild of publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate Books, who came up with it six years ago.

"In my naive state, I thought: Wouldn't a lot of writers be interested in this?" Byng says. But he wasn't so naive as to think that a small publisher based in Scotland could attract the likes of Atwood on its own.

He figured he'd need to team up with other publishers around the world before approaching writers — reversing the usual practice, in which foreign rights are sold after a book is acquired.

Atwood was one of the first he went after. He "leapt out from behind a gorse bush in Scotland and talked me into it," she writes in her acknowledgments — though the bush isn't to be taken literally.

Byng had recruited eight or 10 other publishers by then (including Grove Atlantic in the United States, with which Canongate has formed a more extensive partnership). Thirty-two have now joined in — from Latvia, Korea, Israel, Poland, China and Brazil, among many other countries.

The series kicked off with Atwood's book and two others: Karen Armstrong's introductory volume ("A Short History of Myth") and Jeannette Winterson's take on Atlas ("Weight"). The plan is to expand it gradually over many years. Among the writers who have signed on are A.S. Byatt, Donna Tartt and Chinua Achebe.

The small-format books are designed to be under 30,000 words. This modest scale is an advantage, Byng says: If the length were open-ended, writers might hesitate to commit.