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  • Published: 30 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241983218
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

The Silence of the Girls

From the Booker prize-winning author of Regeneration




The legend of The Iliad retold from the perspective of a woman: queen turned war prize, witness to history

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle.

Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. But, though no one knows it yet, they are just ten weeks away from the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, an end to this long and bitter conflict. Briseis will see it all - and she will bear witness.

  • Published: 30 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9780241983218
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 368

About the author

Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born in 1943. Her books include the highly acclaimed Regeneration trilogy, comprising Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993) and The Ghost Road (1995), which won the Booker Prize, as well as the more recent novels Border Crossing and Double Vision. She lives in Durham.

Also by Pat Barker

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Praise for The Silence of the Girls

A searing twist on The Iliad... Amid the recent slew of rewritings of the great Greek myths and classics, Barker's stands out for its forcefulness of purpose and earthy compassion... Chilling, powerful, audacious

The Times

An important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies

Guardian

She gives a voice to the voiceless...The Silence of the Girls is a book that will be read in generations to come

Daily Telegraph

An impressive feat of literary revisionism that should be on the Man Booker longlist... This is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men... Barker makes us re-think history

Independent

An assured triumph

Sunday Times

Its magnificent final section can't help but make you reflect on the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, the women throughout history who have been told by men to forget their trauma... You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers

Evening Standard

A stunning return to form

Observer

The magic of Barker's book is that the resonance of giving silenced women a voice at the centre of the story is just as relevant today

Grazia

Giving voice to the voiceless, this is a gripping feat of imagination that succeeds in being relevant today

Woman and Home

Angry, thoughtful, sad, deeply humane and compulsively readable, The Silence of the Girls shows that 36 years after her first novel was published, Barker is a writer at the peak of her powers

Irish Times

The most important novel based on The Iliad so far this century

Edith Hall

[Pat Barker] is one of our finest modern chroniclers of war...this magisterial novel is both a timely exploration of power, misogyny and violence and an elegant counternarrative to one of literature's founding conflicts

The Guardian