The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

One of The Washington Post's 50 Most Notable Books of 2018
One of NPR's Best Books of 2018
One of Vanity Fair's Best Fall Books of 2018

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.
--Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey

From the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy comes a monumental new masterpiece, set in the midst of literature's most famous war. Pat Barker turns her attention to the timeless legend of The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War.

The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, who continue to wage bloody war over a stolen woman--Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman watches and waits for the war's outcome: Briseis. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army.
When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and cooly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position to observe the two men driving the Greek forces in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate, not only of Briseis's people, but also of the ancient world at large.
Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war--the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead--all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives--and it is nothing short of magnificent.

With novels like Union Street, Regeneration (shortlisted for Britain's famous Booker Prize and named one of the four finest novels of 1992 by the New York Times), The Eye in the Door (winner of the 1993 Guardian fiction prize), The Ghost Road (winner of the 1995 Booker Prize), and Noonday, Pat Barker has cemented his place among the top contemporary British writers. Pat Barker is an English author who lives in Durham.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780385544214
ISBN 10	0385544219
Title	The Silence of the Girls
Author	Pat Barker
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2018-09-04
Number of pages	304
Prizes	Short-listed for Women's Prize for Fiction 2019
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.