But the sombre clarity of her writing is offset by a luminous wisdom' 'Readers turn to Barker's novels for their plain truths and clear-eyed sense of our history and creation stories. 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. Once again faced with the chance to shape history. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades.Īs if she could wake the dead. Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.Ĭassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails.īut 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. Pat Barker returns to Homer in this gory but unexpectedly uplifting novel' Sunday Times (Aug.Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths. Agent: Clare Alexander, Aitken Alexander Assoc. 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. In a novel filled with names from legend, Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave, smart and loyal. Briseis shares narrative duties with Pyrrhus, the bloodthirsty son of Achilles, and Calchas, a canny priest of Troy. 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. But now Achilles is dead and Briseis is pregnant.

A former queen of a Trojan ally, she was kidnapped by Achilles as his prize of honor and turned into his sex slave.

As time drags on, Briseis, the heroine of the previous installment, struggles to survive as an enemy noncombatant prisoner in the siege camp. 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.

Pat barker the women of troy