The Women of Troy

By: Pat Barker

Narrated by: Kristin Atherton

Brought to you by Penguin.

Following her best-selling, 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 naïve 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....

©2021 Pat Barker (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Entertaining

I found this novel sequel to The Silence of the Girls perfectly entertaining, but didn't enjoy it quite as much as that book. I began to grow a little tired of Briseis, the main narrator, and the plot seemed a bit baggy.

Gripping and brilliant, human and heartbreaking

One of the best books I’ve read in years. Do read The Silence of The Girls first.