Shorlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel Award Booker-winning novelist Pat Barker imagines the untold story of the women at the heart of history's greatest epic'Magnificent...
From the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy comes a brave and masterful retelling 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 and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life. 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. Keenly observant and cooly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position to obse
