The Silence of The Girls

A Novel by Pat Barker
Hardcover: Doubleday, 2018
Paperback Anchor, 2019

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DESCRIPTION

Here is the story of the Iliad as we’ve never heard it before: in the words of Briseis, Trojan queen and captive of Achilles. Given only a few words in Homer’s epic and largely erased by history, she is nonetheless a pivotal figure in the Trojan War. In these pages she comes fully to life: wry, watchful, forging connections among her fellow female prisoners even as she is caught between Greece’s two most powerful warriors. Her story pulls back the veil on the thousands of women who lived behind the scenes of the Greek army camp—concubines, nurses, prostitutes, the women who lay out the dead—as gods and mortals spar, and as a legendary war hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion. Brilliantly written, filled with moments of terror and beauty, The Silence of the Girls gives voice to an extraordinary woman—and makes an ancient story new again.  

"This is 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. 'The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.' Barker's novel is an invitation to tell those forgotten stories, and to listen for voices silenced by history and power."
—Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey

About The Author

Pat Barker is the author of Union Street, Blow Your House Down, Liza’s England, The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize), Another World, Border Crossing, Double Vision, and the Life Class trilogy (Life Class, Toby’s Room, and Noonday). She lives in Durham, England. 

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