The war is over. Troy has fallen. Achilles is dead.

But life goes on for Briseis; life and pain. She is no longer a slave. Her new status is defined by Achilles’ child growing inside her and the wedding vows that his right hand man Alcimus swore to her. Yet she feels no freer than she did before, no less trapped, no less alone, no less scared. All she can do to fight against these feelings is to make sure that the Trojan women, the new slaves ‘earned’ by the sacking of Troy, are safe and cared for.

There is Amina, angry and defiant and determined to bury Priam’s body. There is Hecuba, Priam’s proud wife, who is in denial and acts as though she were still Queen. There is Cassandra, half mad and predicting the tragic deaths of those who wronged her. There is Andromache, recently childless, who seems to have given up all hope. There is even Helen, not quite Greek and not quite Trojan, back where she started and caring for nothing but her tapestries that she weaves night and day.

Once again Pat Barker has astounded with the starkness of her narrative. She doesn’t hold back the punches in presenting a gritty reality of life for Ancient Greek women and she doesn’t try to distract us from the hardship with flowery prose and lengthy descriptions. All we get are the important details and the emotion, giving deep insight to the characters whose voices have previously been excluded from the big Greek myths: the women.

Briseis is a practical character; whilst she is not unfeeling to her situation, she very rarely allows the emotions overwhelm her and simply tries her best to survive. This makes her a good narrator for the stories of the other women who are perhaps less able to overcome their hardships. She understands their problems and can relate to them, but she has had the time and distance to be able to view it all with a certain level of pragmatism.

My only concern with this book is that, though it did help to set the scene, starting a book called ‘the women of troy’ with a male narrated chapter did seem quite jarring. Although these male narrated chapters did help add depth and understanding to the plot, at times they did detract from and undermine the women’s experiences.

Overall, however, this book was an engaging retelling of a less explored aspect of the Trojan War; both in its mostly female focus and in its setting between the end of the war and the beginning of the journey home where time seems to have stood still for a while.

A brilliant and utterly absorbing follow up to The Silence of the Girls. This is a gripping and immersive read - my feet feel dusty from walking around the Trojan camp with Briseis and the other forgotten women of the epic war. I can't wait to see what Pat Barker writes next, MORE PLEASE!

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of this novel.

Pat Barker's Silence of the Girls was one of my favourite books of last year, so I was excited to read this, a direct sequel.

But my excitement somewhat evaporated over the initial sections of the book. Barker's writing is great and she superbly evokes the gritty real-life feel of the aftermath of the siege of Troy but...I felt there was a real lack of thrust or central plotline that compelled me to read on.

I guess the aftermath of great events aren't quite as exciting as the, er, math.

By the halfway point I was struggling to understand what the central plotline was. The book mainly consisted of Briseis going from one house to another and trying to be saintly and nice to everyone. But there was much less of a sense of Briseis herself as the main character this time, she didn't feel fleshed out as she did in the first book.

In itself, I think this is a decent book but unfortunately it pales in comparison to its predecessor.

I really enjoyed the follow up to The Silence of the Girls - perhaps even more so because I was back on familiar territory with a character that I knew and liked in Briseis. An interesting look at a lesser told part of the Trojan war history with interesting choices for the male perspectives that make it seem fresh and new whilst also drawing on classic Greek tragedy, like Antigone

When I was younger I avidly read stories of Ancient Greece and Rome; Pat Barker gives these stories a whole new perspective. Following on from The Silence of the Girls, Troy is destroyed, and King Priam’s body lies unburied on the shore. The men of Troy are dead, the women taken as spoils of war. Briseis continues her story: Given to Achilles as a prize, now carrying his child and married to his friend Alcimus, she and the other women of Troy need to find ways to cope with their new, uncertain futures. Unlikely friendships form, with Briseis gradually rising to a position of respect and leadership among the other women.
Tensions run high amongst the various different armies that made up the invading forces, men with little to do but wait for favourable weather conditions so that they can go home.
Pat Barker does an excellent job of bringing to life these characters from ancient legends. Briseis became very real to me and I look forward to seeing where her story takes us next.

I seem to have unintentionally picked a perfect week to read Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, with changeable weather and downpours keeping us home mirroring the oppressive winds keeping the Greeks from sailing home in triumph after the sacking of Troy.

Women of Troy is a quieter, more atmospheric and nuanced book than Silence of The Girls. The Greek camp, full of spoils of war - enslaved Trojan women and treasure, is restless, tense. Bored men with nowhere to go and nothing to do but drink the endless free flowing wine and pick quarrels. Among them is Pyrrhus (also known as Neoptolemus), who struggles with the enormous weight of being Achilles’ son and acts out at any perceived slight to his honour but Barker notably builds him into a more complex character.

Briseis returns, now married, she visits and observes the other women, Hecuba, Andromache, Helen, Cassandra, offering help and support as far as she is able to. Most are cooped up in huts, traumatised and unable to grieve their lost husbands, fathers or sons – in a way, their silence and powerlessness are even more palpable in this book.

I thought the book’s setting, this in-between time, worked really well to bring into focus the treatment of women and their individual responses to enslavement. I also liked some of the liberties Barker took with the source materials, such as the secret burial of Priam echoing Antigone and how she used this to explore her characters conflicting emotions and reactions. Overall, I actually preferred The Women of Troy to Silence of The Girls although I might now read the first book again.

My thanks to Penguin UK and Netgalley for the opportunity to read The Women of Troy.

3.5 stars


Enjoyable follow up to the silence of the girls,that continues the story as the Greeks wait to sail home,taking the spoils of war with them.
Good central characters,and such an engaging way of writing.
There are some fairly brutal parts in the story,but it's all treated as every day life...
I hope Barker sees her way to writing more along these lines.

3.5 stars for The Women of Troy. The premise of this book intrigued me. Such a famous tale, and told from an interesting angle, from the forgotten, overlooked women. I confess I have not read the prequel, The Silence of the Girls, so for me this was a standalone book, which did work as we get enough of the history woven in to know where we are in the story, although I did get confused with the mix of names, and who had been married to who and who was related to who, but that was possibly due to a lack of my knowledge about the Trojan War, apart from the most well known names.

The main POV character is Briseis, who was previously given to Achilles as a prize and is now pregnant with Achilles child and married to his general, Alchimus. We also hear from other enslaved women, with a couple of male voices, one of which is Pyrrhus, son of Achilles. The stage is set after the famous sack of Troy in the forced hiatus before the warriors sail home.

It was interesting to be a part of that camp for a while, to navigate the politics with Briseis and see how various characters reacted to their fate. However, I did feel it fell short in truly transporting me there and allowing me to smell the scents and see the sights, and truly walk in the character's shoes. I also wasn't convinced by some of the dialogue. While the POV from Pyrrhus trying to live up to being the son of the legendary Achilles was interesting (one of the most interesting) I did wonder why he was included in what I assumed would be an all-female POV cast.

Overall the novel is set in a time of stasis, which is a strength and a weakness as a feeling of waiting permeates, even through the points of plot. This is a nuanced and subtle story from these women, which is interesting given the overwhelming and massive experiences they have lived through, the grief, the horror, the death and darkness. Perhaps it was too subtle for me as I just felt something was lacking.

I love Pat Barker and I really enjoyed her version of the classics in 'The Silence of the Girls', so I was a bit disappointed by this book. It was still interesting and and an easy read, but seemed to be the filler in a series, rather than a complete story on its own. In this sequel the protagonist, Briseis, became more of a plot device rather than the author of her story as in the first book. I'm hoping there will be further volumes, because this one felt like it was devoted to getting through a lot of plot and 'what happened to who?'

I was excited to be allowed to read this, however this felt nothing like the Pat Barker writing I was expecting. I found I didn’t care about any of the characters and the plot felt drawn out and seemed to go on endlessly.

I absolutely LOVED The Silence Of The Girls and this did not disappoint! We get to take a look inside Pyrrhus(Achilles’ son)’ mind, and see his struggles with identity and living up to his father’s reputation as the greatest warrior among the Greeks. I really loved the way Pat Barker explored the nuances of his character
and doesn’t completely villainise him. Briseis is the same interesting, witty narrator as she was before, so reading her thoughts on the complex relationships she has with the other women involved in this story(Helen, Cassandra, Hecuba etc.) is endlessly fun. Also, Briseis’ feelings about motherhood and pregnancy were really well crafted. The portrayal of all the women’s grief, suffering and anger is just so poignant and really sticks in your mind.
As with many Greek mythology retellings, this book requires a little background knowledge, but not as much as other books I have read, so i think it is quite accessible to non-classics students.

Anyone who became immersed in Pat Barker’s ‘The Silence of the Girls’ is likely to enjoy her follow-on story, ‘The Women of Troy’, centring on Briseis, married to Alcimus and carrying the late Achilles’ child. Now in the aftermath of the Trojan War, Barker continues to give the reader a specifically female view of the times. Nonetheless, we are occasionally allowed the male perspective, most powerfully at the beginning of the novel as the Greek soldiers, crowded, tense and sweating inside the wooden horse wait to see if the strange gift will be accepted: ‘It’s hot in here; the place reeks of resin from freshly cut pine logs – and something very odd has started to happen, because he tastes the resin and smells the heat. The insides of his nostrils feels scorched.’
As ever, Barker’s ability to describe people and places, thoughts and feelings, be they ever so far from contemporary life, bring these ancient characters vividly to life. Whether squashed in the bowels of the famous wooden horse, or on a windswept beach burying a corpse, or in a crowded tent giving birth, the author’s superb use of language ensures that the reader can imagine the atmosphere, the tensions, the fear of being caught by the enemy.
Whilst Barker tells the story of the Trojan women as they wait on calmer seas so that they can be taken to Greece as part of the spoils of war, she doesn’t give the reader a simple ‘sisters united’ picture. Just because these women are connected by race, gender and experience does not mean that they all respond the same way to their plight and the story’s strength lies in the portrayal of these differences. Another engrossing adaptation of a very old tale.
My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin General UK for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

A follow up to the hugely successful (and brilliant) The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy picks up almost exactly at the end of the first book. I really enjoyed The Silence of the Girls, which I read last year so was really excited to read this new addition to the story. At the start I struggled to get into it. I wish I’d reread The Silence of the Girls before I started as I think that would have really helped. Once I started to remember the characters, though, I was really engaged by it and began to really enjoy it. It was lovely to pick up the stories again, and it’s actually made me want to go back and reread The Silence of the Girls again now I’ve finished.

The ending makes me realise (and hope!) that there is a 3rd book in the series to come, which will hopefully finish up the story.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it will be very successful. Thank you for my review copy in return for this honest review.

As a great fan of Pat Barker’s ‘Regeneration’ trilogy, I was intrigued to read her ‘regenerating’ of the Greek victory over Troy in ‘The Trojan Women’.
Despite their triumph over Troy following the 10 year siege, and their sadistic murder of Trojan King Priam, the Greeks are stranded, unable to sail home because of weather conditions.
In the ‘waiting time’, these ‘great’ Greek heroes; including the sons of Achilles, drink, and establish flimsy loyalties, while the captured Trojan women wait together in a compound for the call to satisfy the sexual appetites of Greek men satiated by food and wine, exhausted by uproarious singing and incapable of only the most feeble but humiliating violation of their enemies’ wives and daughters.
Meanwhile, Breseis, mistress of Achilles, comforts and connects the Trojan women in a kind of sisterhood. United, they grow strong, stronger than ‘the men.
Unforgettable opening and a modern, fresh addition to the genre of retelling classical myths.
With many thanks to #Penguin General and #NetGalley for my free download in return for an honest review.

Fans of "A Thousand Ships" and "Circe" will love "The Women of Troy". When I read the classics I was always fascinated by the women, arguably the ones most affected by the war and yet rarely heard from. This is their story, and a captivating one it is too. Thanks for the ARC!

The Women of Troy is a follow up to Pat Barker's other hugely successful novel The Silence of the Girls. I went in expecting more of the same in terms of Barker offering an interesting and nuanced portrayal of the aftermath of the sacking of Troy and to a certain extent this is what we get - however this time around the plot / pacing dragged immensely and dare I say it...this book was pretty boring at certain points. Briseis is still the highlight of this book, though I feel like the other two perspectives; Pyrrus and Calchas feel somewhat a strange choice given the novel is supposedly all about the Women of Troy and their arcs. Perhaps this was just a case of this novel not being the right one for me but I know there will be other readers out there who will enjoy this.

As always with Pat Barker, this was great. I had to have a quick scan through The Silence of the Girls to remind myself of where we'd stopped.

This was a good second outing, providing context of the aftermath of the Trojan war, as the captured women learn their fates and Briseis, first person narrator from The Silence of Girls, navigates an entirely new existence. Captured before the fall of Troy and pregnant with Achilles' son, Briseis is now married, protected and no longer a slave— but she remains tied to the women of the camp, unable to forget when she was them. Her attitude to her pregnancy is also really interesting, and avoids the temptation toward trite maternalism.

I also enjoyed the introduction of Pyrrhus (Neoptolamus), infamous in all the stories that mention him for being hideous, but here Barker offers a different viewpoint, of a man tied to his legacy as Achilles' son, unable to rise from that expectation. All the same, though she makes him more sympathetic, Barker never seeks forgiveness for his actions.

I thought this was a really interesting moment to pick, the ships and men stuck in the camps as they wait for the winds to change, allowing them to go back to Greece. Barker plays well in the stagnation, pushing perspectives against each other to interrogate new ground.

A huge thank you to Netgalley and Penguin for providing me with an ARC. </p>

This novel follows on from the previous work, the prior being set during the events of Homer's Iliad and this novel taking place in the aftermath of the war, starting with the Trojan Horse and ending with the Greeks finally making their voyages home. When I read The Silence of the Girls considered it to absolutely be setting the bar for future mythology retellings to aspire to and I am really happy that the sequel does the same. While I did not necessarily think there needed to be a sequel, the novel more than justifies its existence by the themes it explores, all of which are fascinating, difficult and thoroughly examined.

Let us start with Briseis, the first-person narrator in a majority of the chapters in both this book and its previous one. What Barker does with Briseis is incredibly interesting. Briseis was captured before the sack of Troy so is already part of the furniture of the Greek camp when the newly added female prisoners, slaves and 'conqubines" arrive. She is both a person of authority but also was one of them. But also technically not in the same category anymore. She is pregnant to Achilles' child and Achilles arranged a marriage to one of his advisors before his death ensuring her a certain amount of protection now that elevates her from the women she feels a kinship with. The way Pat Barker depicts this difficult situation is done very well. In a continuation of the themes in the previous novel, Briseis is very conscious of her position relative to other women and that consciousness influences her actions.

The complexity of the depiction of Briseis' pregnancy is incredible. Barker doesn't fall into the trap of motherhood and maternal feelings triumphing over all. Much in the same way Barker allowed Briseis' complicated relationship with Achilles to not simply be a 'rocky romance' (or even a romance at all), Barker allows the difficult plotline to breathe, to exist.

Briseis' pregnancy while always being grounded and personal, also adds an additional element to the discussion of gender in the narrative, in the way that pregnancy is actually the way to achieve stability and security for the women in the camp despite the horror involved.

There is a certain amount of pragmaticism in Briseis' outlook throughout the book, something that I think is one of the strongest but most understated themes. What Barker does extremely well in these books is her portrayal of the banality of grief, outrage and trauma. It is exhausting going through what the characters do, to be so scared, humiliated, victimised and destroyed all the time. They are living nightmares but equally the nightmares have become normal. It is subtle but incredibly poignant.

Achilles is already dead at the opening of this novel, so this time Barker's second POV character is Achilles' only son, Pyrrhus. What Barker did so masterfully with Pyrrhus, was she perfectly demonstrated the yoke he suffers under from the legacy of his father but never exonerates his actions.

Pyrrhus has gained a pretty nasty reputation mythologically, known for the killings of the elderly Priam, several of Priam's children, including his young daughters and even Priam's infant grandson. In this novel, Barker crafts a horrible, unpredictable, arrogant, petulant, child-warrior in the 16-year-old Pyrrhus, never shying away from his terrible deeds while still depicting his desperation for approval and the horrendous insecurity he feels from being Great Achilles' son. Her 'explanations' serve not to invite the reader to forgive him but to contribute to the incredibly complex portrayal much as she did for Achilles previously. I was so impressed with the nuance of her depiction.

With the fall of Troy, we also see many more iconic mythological women entering the camp. Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra and Helen all feature heavily in the narrative, each used to explore different reactions to grief and despair. The collective experiences of these women along with the "common women", provides an interesting analysis of gender in these stories.

In the world of Greek mythology, women are stateless. Their nationality, their clan, is that of their husbands, fathers or masters, meaning the way they engage with the world is fundamentally different to those of the Greeks. Geographically they have moved a matter of miles, but as far as the Greeks are concerned there are only two Trojans in the camp; the men.

However, again the enforcement of this notion is not simply imposed on them by the men themselves but reproduced in the women, alienating them from each other. The depiction of Helen is especially interesting in this regard, with Barker's insightful emphasis on the way many women actually appear to blame Helen more than any of the men who have committed the crimes against them. There is a sense of her having asked for it, having deserved everything despite the war being the result of men.

The power dynamics are not taken for granted but are exposed in these novels, even when it comes to the relative privilege women like Briseis and Hecuba have, without negating the things they have been through.

The depiction of the women in the camp is not ever simple, which is exactly as it should be. The situation is not simple. Fundamentally that is what makes these retellings so good. Instead of a vacuous cry for girl power, Barker really analyses and considers the position of women and men in these stories and the result is fantastic to read.

I enjoyed this a lot more than Silence of the Girls. It's a point of view you don't hear from often (I think I read enough historical Greek fiction to be able to say that). You don't need to have a lot of background knowledge on the fall of Troy to to enjoy it or understand it but it took me a little while to get used to the author's voice, I felt it was a little jumpy but that's just personal preference. There were a couple of characters I didn't particularly warm to but the characters and the story make you think about the role women played in Ancient Greece, especially in relation to men so it feels a little timely right now.

I was eagerly anticipating this sequel to The Silence of the Girls, the story of Briseis and the other Trojan women captured in the Greek/Trojan wars. I re-read that first novel in the trilogy before reading The Women of Troy and reminded myself of the historical characters and the powerful voice of Briseis who gave their story back to all those women that history has forgotten.
This new novel starts where The Silence of the Girls ended: Achilles has just died in battle. Briseis is pregnant with Achilles' child and is married to Alcimus, so now in principle a 'free' woman and no longer a slave.
New arrivals in this second episode include Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who never met his father but arrogantly assumes that the world should view him as the fearless warrior that his father was. There is also an increased focus on Calchas, the Trojan seer who advises Agamemnon while being ridiculed by many of the Greek warriors.
This novel focuses on the long wait of the Greek army to return home following the fall of Troy. The winds are against them setting sail for home and they are stranded in the beach encampment, frustrated and irritable.
Briseis is lonely and unhappy in her life. Her husband is rarely at home and she misses the companionship of her friends from when she lived as Achilles' slave. She works hard to create and maintain bonds with the other 'Trojan women', most of whom are now living as slaves in the women's hut.
Perhaps Pat Barker intentionally made the narrative of a short time stretch out to mirror the feelings of those waiting but I felt there was too much repetition and not enough of the plot and character development that I had seen in the first novel. By the end of this book Briseis is still pregnant and she is about to set sail for a new home. I will read the next part of the trilogy because overall they are well researched and written but I will not be so desperately waiting for the third part to be published.
My thanks to the publisher via Net Galley for a complimentary ARC of this title in return for an unbiased review.