Following her bestselling,critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls,Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.
Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home victors,loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold,stolen weapons,stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails.
But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated,unburied - and so the victors remain in limbo,camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed,pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea. And,in these empty,restless days,the hierarchies that held them together begin to fray,old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester.
Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors,Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can - with young,dangerously naive Amina,with defiant,aged Hecuba,with Calchus,the disgraced priest - and begins to see the path to a kind of revenge. Briseis has survived the Trojan War,but peacetime may turn out to be even more dangerous...
Publisher: Penguin Books LtdISBN: 9780241988336Number of pages: 320Weight: 225 gDimensions: 198 x 129 x 19 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'In a novel filled with names from legend,Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave,smart and loyal. Barker's latest is a wonder.'- Publisher's Weekly
'This continuation of the Trojan woman's story feels like another victory for every person who was silenced by history,their story stolen from them'- Refinery 29
'A stirring adventure set amid a misogynist dystopia'- Anthony Cummins,The Observer
'Barker is at her best when she evokes Hecuba's grief on the shore,surrounded by a group of female slaves with the ruined city behind them...'- TLS
'As a novelist,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. She extends it even to the often brutal men. Her overall achievement is to have taken one of the great myths of European history,something that has permeated Western culture for 3,000 years,and made something new and immediate of it.'- i
I'd still rather read Barker's take on the gruesome realities and costs of war - ancient or modern - than any other novelist out there.'- The Daily Telegraph
Pat Barker
Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy - climaxing with the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road of 1995 - pushed her to front rank of British historical novelists. Brilliantly fusing an almost unparalleled level of veracity with a profound understanding of story and allusion,almost single-handedly Barker elevated the concept of the historical novel to the literary. Subsequently,Barker has rounded on a number of other themes,including the exploration of morality and children in the uncompromising Border Crossing and the exceptional,pan-Second World War narrative cycle of Life Class,Toby's Room and Noonday.
Visit the Pat Barker author page
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