The Women of Troy
The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller
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4.4 • 47 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.
'Myth for a MeToo age. Pat Barker returns to Homer in this gory but unexpectedly uplifting novel' Sunday Times
Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it.
The women of Troy.
Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.
Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them.
Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king.
Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead.
And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history.
Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls.
'Readers turn to Barker's novels for their plain truths and clear-eyed sense of our history and creation stories. But the sombre clarity of her writing is offset by a luminous wisdom' Sunday Times
'The Women Of Troy's immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker's precise, elegant writing' Metro
'Barker has always looked on the world with the combination of a cold eye and a sympathetic understanding. Her characterisation is sharp, her sympathy deep' ipaper
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In the sequel to her widely lauded feminist retelling of The Iliad, Pat Barker continues to lay bare the horrors of war, its aftermath, and the treatment of women barely acknowledged as human, if at all. With 2018’s The Silence of the Girls, Barker reimagined the epic largely through the eyes of Briseis, a queen awarded to Achilles after the sacking of her city by the Greeks. The Women of Troy, which once again centres a now-pregnant Briseis, follows events after Achilles’ death and the fall of Troy. The victorious Greeks, having angered the gods, find themselves stranded in their camps, along with the women they hold captive. While there are moments of the poeticism one might expect from a story including Helen, Hecuba and Cassandra, it’s the unflinching nature of Barker’s prose and her use of accessible modern language that give the novel its wrenching immediacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Barker's masterly continuation of her fiercely feminist take on Homer's Iliad (after The Silence of the Girls), the Greeks drag their wooden horse into Troy and achieve victory after a 10-year siege, but a freak storm prevents their ships from returning home. As time drags on, Briseis, the heroine of the previous installment, struggles to survive as an enemy noncombatant prisoner in the siege camp. A former queen of a Trojan ally, she was kidnapped by Achilles as his prize of honor and turned into his sex slave. But now Achilles is dead and Briseis is pregnant. Handed down to Lord Alcimus as his wife, she spends her days, as soldiers play football with a human head, commiserating with the other Trojan women—Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache and, of course, Helen, the cause of the war. Briseis shares narrative duties with Pyrrhus, the bloodthirsty son of Achilles, and Calchas, a canny priest of Troy. In a novel filled with names from legend, Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave, smart and loyal. The author makes strategic use of anachronistic language ("living in the real world," "keep a low profile") to illuminate characters living at the dawn of myth. Barker's latest is a wonder.
Customer Reviews
The Women of Troy
Beautiful but brutal story of women’s lives as losers in a war between ‘heroes’ of opposing forces in Ancient times. Still undecided on the modernity of the writing but nobody ever stops to enquire about the fate of women in war as even in the 21st century men make war on the slightest imperialistic slights & as such is it once again the women who pick up the pieces & as such are the true heroes … LONG LIVE UKRAINE!