The masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - f rom the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra’s arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon’s triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared. Clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak. Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.

Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king.

Readers turn to Barker's novels for their plain truths and clear-eyed sense of our history and creation stories. But the sombre clarity of her writing is offset by a luminous wisdom' Sunday Times Hecuba, howling and clawing her cheeks on the silent shore, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead. The Voyage Home will continue the story ofthe captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks. Publishing director Simon Prosseracquired British and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander.Barker aims to complete the novel by the end of 2022, for publication in August 2023. Published in 2018, Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls was a rewriting of the plot of the Iliad from the point of view of a captive queen, Briseis, over whose possession Agamemnon and Achilles fell out. It wasn’t an easy task Barker had set herself. Achilles – terrifying, charismatic and doomed to an early death – is hard to sideline. Through Briseis’s clear eyes the Greek base, peopled by fighting men and captive women, was revealed to be a “rape camp”. But, as Briseis herself remarks, “A song isn’t new merely because a woman’s voice is singing it.” The story remained, stubbornly, one mainly about men. In this sequel, though, Barker has stepped free of the masculinist epic tradition. Briseis is still the narrator, but Barker has left the Iliad behind, with its insistence on the glory and the pathos of warfare. The Women of Troy draws mainly on a very different source – Euripides’ tragedy The Trojan Women. This is a story not of conflict but of its aftermath. When a person is turned into a literal commodity, she risks becoming as near to nothingness as a chewed bone The third book in her acclaimed series reimagining the Iliad story from the perspective of the Trojan women, which began with The Silence of the Girls.

Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon's triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared. Barker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday TimesTroy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it. It is grim. The words “filthy” and “stained” recur. Even the sea is foul, yellowish-grey and full of dead things. War is dirty and ugly and smelly and Barker never lets us forget it. Men may set out in the morning oiled and glorious as Phoebus Apollo, their chariots glittering, but at nightfall “ash-grey men driving dirty horses would emerge from the clouds of dust”. Cassandra, who has learned not to be too attached to her own prophecies. They have only ever been believed when she can get a man to deliver them.