Pat Barker

the-silence-of-the-girls

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more

source_10558

By signing up, I confirm that I'm over 16. To find out what personal data we collect and how we use it, please visit our <a href="/company/about-us/notices/privacy-policy/">Privacy Policy</a>

Keep an eye out for a confirmation in your inbox

Stories, ideas and giveaways to help you spark young imaginations

source_10972

The latest books, activities and tips to help you grow little readers

source_10975

About us

About Us (Header 4)

john-le-carre-a-legacy-of-spies-960-2.jpg

Margaret Atwood

Richard Osman

Malorie Blackman

George Orwell

marian_keyes_mobile_320x200px.png

Elif Shafak

shonfaye

Authors (Header 3)

Books (Header 2)

Company

Features (Header 1)

Penguin Shop (Header 5)

Useful links

The Voyage Home

The Women of Troy

The first novel in Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning Regeneration trilogy

Regeneration

The Eye in the Door

The Ghost Road

Life Class

Noonday

The Regeneration Trilogy

Toby's Room

Double Vision

Border Crossing

Another World

The Silence of the Girls

A searing twist on The Iliad... Amid the recent slew of rewritings of the great Greek myths and classics, Barker's stands out for its forcefulness of purpose and earthy compassion... Chilling, powerful, audacious

Angry, thoughtful, sad, deeply humane and compulsively readable, The Silence of the Girls shows that 36 years after her first novel was published, Barker is a writer at the peak of her powers

Its magnificent final section can't help but make you reflect on the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, the women throughout history who have been told by men to forget their trauma... You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers

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

She gives a voice to the voiceless...The Silence of the Girls is a book that will be read in generations to come

An impressive feat of literary revisionism that should be on the Man Booker longlist... This is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men... Barker makes us re-think history

Giving voice to the voiceless, this is a gripping feat of imagination that succeeds in being relevant today

The most important novel based on The Iliad so far this century

The magic of Barker's book is that the resonance of giving silenced women a voice at the centre of the story is just as relevant today

[Pat Barker] is one of our finest modern chroniclers of war...this magisterial novel is both a timely exploration of power, misogyny and violence and an elegant counternarrative to one of literature's founding conflicts

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY 
 
'Chilling, powerful, audacious' The Times 
 
'Magnificent. You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers' Evening Standard 
 
There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan War whose voice has been silent - until now. Discover the greatest Greek myth of all - retold by the witness that history forgot . . . 
 
Briseis was a queen until her city was destroyed. Now she is a slave to the man who butchered her husband and brothers. Trapped in a world defined by men, can she survive to become the author of her own story? 
 
PERFECT FOR FANS OF MADELINE MILLER'S CIRCE AND THE SONG OF ACHILLES. 
 
*Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel Award* 
 
Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths in The Women of Troy.

'I heard him before I saw him: his battle cry ringing around the walls...' 
 
When her city falls to the Greeks, led to victory by the god-like warrior Achilles, Briseis's old life is shattered. Abducted and shipped to the Greek camp on the battleground at Troy, she goes from queen to captive, from free woman to slave, awarded to Achilles as a prize of honour. She's not alone. On the same day, and on many others in the course of a long, bitter war, innumerable women have been wrested from their homes and flung to the fighters. 
 
As told in The Iliad, the Trojan War was a quarrel between men - over Helen, stolen from her home and spirited to Troy, a voiceless female icon of male desire. But what of the women in this story, silenced by their fates? What words did they speak when alone with each other, in the laundry, at the loom, when laying out the dead? 
 
In this magnificent novel of the Trojan War, Pat Barker summons the voices of Briseis and her fellow women to tell this mythic story anew, foregrounding their experiences against the backdrop of savage battle between men. One of the great contemporary writers on war and its collateral damage, Pat Barker here reimagines the most famous of all wars in literature, charting one woman's journey through the chaos of the Greek encampment, as she struggles to free herself and to become the author of her own story.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons. Now she is Achilles' concubine: a prize of battle. 
 
Briseis is just one among thousands of women backstage in this war - the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead - all of them voiceless in history. But, though no one knows it yet, they are just ten weeks away from the death of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, an end to this long and bitter conflict. Briseis will see it all - and she will bear witness.

The Silence of the Girls

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

Reviews

About the author

Pat Barker

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter