Jane Alison, the critically acclaimed author of The Love Artist, now takes on an equally demanding and in some ways more rigorous challenge: translating substantial portions of the Metamorphoses, Ovid's great epic of universal change, into elegant and remarkably faithful blank verse, along with selections from the Amores.

The year is 1757. The English and the French are at war in North America. Two sisters Cora and Alice want to visit their father, General Munro. They begin their dangerous journey with the handsome English officer, Duncan Heyward and the Indian guide, Magua. On the way they meet friends and enemies, and many adventures. Some people will be heroes and some people will die. And what will happen to their friend Uncas, the last of the Mohican Indians?

The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. Its success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and partly in his evocation of the wild beautiful landscapes of North America which the French and the British fought to control throughout the 18th century. At the centre of the novel is the celebrated massacre of British troops and their families by Indian allies of the French at Fort William Henry in 1757. Around this historical event, Cooper built a romantic fiction of captivity, sexuality and heroism, in which the destiny of the Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawkeye, the frontier scout. The controlled, elaborate writing gives natural pace to the violence of the novel's action: like the nature whose plundering Cooper laments, the book's placid surface conceals inexplicable and deathly forces.