* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
* Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston
Globe, St. Louis Dispatch
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín
comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her
children--"brilliant...gripping...high drama...made tangible and graphic
in Tóibín's lush prose" (Booklist, starred review).
"I have been acquainted with the smell of death." So begins
Clytemnestra's tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary
Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail
with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her
new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of
Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war.
Judged, despised, cursed by gods, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga
that led to these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest
daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to
sacrifice her; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner
Aegisthus; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how
Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning
betrayal--his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child.
House of Names "is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful
woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on
her gender...Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range," (The
Washington Post). He brings a modern sensibility and language to an
ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so
that we not only believe Clytemnestra's thirst for revenge, but applaud
it. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a
murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is
Orestes's story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother's lover
Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful
Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and
slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates
of both of them in her hands.
