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. The Women Of Troys immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barkers. Briseis shares narrative duties with Pyrrhus, the bloodthirsty son of Achilles, and Calchas, a canny priest of Troy. Pat Barker returns to Homer in this gory but unexpectedly uplifting novel.

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. Author Pat Barker and narrator Kristin Atherton combine their considerable powers in this second volume of Barkers Trojan trilogy, giving us a remark. As time drags on, Briseis, the heroine of the previous installment, struggles to survive as an enemy noncombatant prisoner in the siege camp. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.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. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. It's an apt opening scene: Pat Barker's two novels of the Trojan war, The Women of Troy and 2018's The Silence of the Girls, are about women bearing intelligent witness to the ineptitude. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. She has Agamemnon marry Cassandra at Troy (p. Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war-including the women of Troy themselves. And later in her novel, Barker shows Diomedes very much alive competing in a chariot race after the war ends (p. A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Illiad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it-an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy.

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker