The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker - Penguin Books Australia

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The greatest war story in literature, retold by our greatest living storyteller on war - in the voice of the forgotten woman who lived through it.

Queen Briseis has been stolen from her conquered homeland and given as a concubine to a foreign warrior. The warrior is Achilles: famed hero, loathed enemy, ruthless butcher, darkly troubled spirit. Briseis's fate is now indivisibly entwined with his.

No one knows it yet, but there are just ten weeks to go until the Fall of Troy, the end of this long and bitter war. This is the start of The Iliad: the most famous war story ever told. The next ten weeks will be a story of male power, male ego, male violence. But what of the women? The thousands of female slaves in the soldiers' camp - in the laundry, at the loom, laying out the dead? Briseis is one of their number - and she will be our witness to history.

Pat Barker

Formats & editions

Paperback

9780241983201

June 18, 2019

Hamish Hamilton

336 pages

RRP $19.99
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Hardback

9780241338070

September 15, 2018

Hamish Hamilton

368 pages

RRP $42.99
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Trade Paperback

9780241338094

September 3, 2018

Hamish Hamilton

336 pages

RRP $32.99
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The Silence of the Girls

Pat Barker

EBook

9780241983218

August 30, 2018

Penguin eBooks
Online retailers

Extract

I

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.

Swift-footed Achilles. Now there’s an interesting one. More than anything else, more than brilliance, more than greatness, his speed defined him. There’s a story that he once chased the god Apollo all over the plains of Troy. Cornered at last, Apollo is supposed to have said: ‘You can’t kill me, I’m immortal.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ Achilles replied. ‘But we both know if you weren’t immortal, you’d be dead.’

Nobody was ever allowed the last word; not even a god.

I heard him before I saw him: his battle cry ringing round the walls of Lyrnessus.

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