A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad 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 and "one of contemporary literature's most
thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post).
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.
They await a fair wind for the Aegean.
It does not come, because the gods are offended. 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. Old feuds resurface and new
suspicions and rivalries begin to fester.
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. 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.
