New historical fiction books to read in 2025

Reading lists

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9 holiday reads set in Greece

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The best novels based on mythology from around the world

With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Books that defined the 1990s

Pat Barker on The Iliad: Men do not hear women's silences

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Interviews

Pat Barker on The Iliad: Men do not hear women’s silences

The Women of Troy

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths. 
 
'Myth for a MeToo age. Pat Barker returns to Homer in this gory but unexpectedly uplifting novel' Sunday Times 
 
Troy 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. 
 
The women of Troy. 
 
Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over. 
 
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. 
 
Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. 
 
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. 
 
And Briseis, carrying her future in her womb: the unborn child of the dead hero Achilles. Once again caught up in the disputes of violent men. Once again faced with the chance to shape history. 
 
Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls. 
 
'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 
 
'The Women Of Troy's immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker's precise, elegant writing' Metro 
 
'Barker has always looked on the world with the combination of a cold eye and a sympathetic understanding. Her characterisation is sharp, her sympathy deep' ipaper

In a novel filled with names from legend, Briseis stands tall as a heroine: brave, smart and loyal. Barker's latest is a wonder.

This continuation of the Trojan woman's story feels like another victory for every person who was silenced by history, their story stolen from them

A stirring adventure set amid a misogynist dystopia

Barker is at her best when she evokes Hecuba's grief on the shore, surrounded by a group of female slaves with the ruined city behind them...

As a novelist, Barker has always looked on the world with the combination of a cold eye and a sympathetic understanding. Her characterisation is sharp, her sympathy deep. She extends it even to the often brutal men. 
Her overall achievement is to have taken one of the great myths of European history, something that has permeated Western culture for 3,000 years, and made something new and immediate of it.

I'd still rather read Barker's take on the gruesome realities and costs of war - ancient or modern - than any other novelist out there.

Merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak.

This is a powerful page-turner, bringing ancient characters and stories into full colour. Skip Homer, and just enjoy this epic read

Briseis . . . returns again in this rich, readable sequel . . . Barker brings to life the mythical Trojan women.

Pat Barker writes wonderfully - I've read most of her books. When she describes something, it feels sensory and concrete. You can imagine clearly what she's talking about. I couldn't put it down.

Troy has fallen and the Greek victors are primed to return home, loaded with spoils. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. 
 
But the wind does not come. The gods are offended - the body of Priam lies desecrated, unburied - and so the victors remain in uneasy limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed. The coalition that held them together begins to fray, as old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester. 
 
Largely unnoticed by her squabbling captors, erstwhile queen Briseis remains in the Greek encampment. She forges alliances where she can - with young, rebellious Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, with Calchus, the disgraced priest - and she begins to see the path to revenge...

Regeneration

The modern classic of contemporary war fiction from Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls, Regeneration is a powerfully moving portrait of the deep legacy of human trauma in the First World War. 
 
RECOMMENDED BY RICHARD OSMAN 
 
Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, and army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front. Pat Barker's Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men. 
 
'Brilliant, intense and subtle' Peter Kemp, Sunday Times 
 
'One of the strongest and most interesting novelists of her generation' Guardian 
 
'Unforgettable' Sunday Telegraph 
 
The Regeneration trilogy: 
Regeneration 
The Eye in the Door 
The Ghost Road

Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to make the men in his charge healthy enough to fight. Yet the closer he gets to mending his patients' minds the harder becomes every decision to send them back to the horrors of the front ... 
 
Regeneration is the classic exploration of how the traumas of war brutalised a generation of young men. 
 
The first book in the Regeneration trilogy

The Eye in the Door

The masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
WINNER OF THE 1993 GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE 
 
'Spellbinding and startlingly original' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'Gripping, moving, profoundly intelligent' Independent on Sunday 
 
'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 
 
London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men - pacifists, objectors, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before - army psychiatrist William Rivers - Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be. The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it. 
 
The Regeneration Trilogy: 
Regeneration 
The Eye in the Door 
The Ghost Road

London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his private encounters with women and men &ndash; pacifists, objectors, homosexuals &ndash; conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. Forced to consult the man who helped him before &ndash; army psychiatrist William Rivers &ndash; Prior must confront his inability to be the dutiful soldier his superiors wish him to be &hellip; 
 
The Eye in the Door is a heart-rending study of the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it. 
 
The second book in the Regeneration trilogy

The Ghost Road

The Booker Prize-winning final novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - from the acclaimed author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
'An extraordinary tour de force. One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe 
 
'Powerful, deeply moving... A triumph' Sunday Times 
 
'Harrowing, original, unforgettable' Independent 
 
1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care - particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation. The Ghost Road is a vivid and unforgettable account of the devastating final months of the First World War. 
 
The Regeneration Trilogy: 
Regeneration 
The Eye in the Door 
The Ghost Road

1918, the closing months of the war. Army psychiatrist William Rivers is increasingly concerned for the men who have been in his care &ndash; particularly Billy Prior, who is about to return to combat in France with young poet Wilfred Owen. As Rivers tries to make sense of what, if anything, he has done to help these injured men, Prior and Owen await the final battles in a war that has decimated a generation &hellip; 
 
The Ghost Road is the Booker Prize winning account of the devastating final months of the First World War. 
 
The third book in the Regeneration trilogy

Life Class

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
The first novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed 'Life Class' trilogy - an unforgettable story of art and war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart 
 
'Triumphant, inspiring, shattering' The Times 
 
'Barker writes as brilliantly as ever... With great tenderness and insight she conveys a wartime world turned upside down' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Masterly, gripping' Penelope Lively 
 
'Extraordinarily powerful' Sunday Telegraph 
 
Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks's studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army won't take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross just as he and fellow student Elinor Brooke admit their feelings for one another. Amidst the devastation in Ypres, Paul comes to see the world anew - but have his experiences changed him completely? 
 
The Life Class trilogy: 
Life Class 
Toby's Room 
Noonday

Sharply written and elegantly constructed...breathtaking

In the Spring of 1914 a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but when Kit Neville - himself not long out of the Slade but already a well-known painter - makes it clear that he, too, is attracted to Elinor, Paul withdraws into a passionate affair with an artist's model. As spring turns to summer, Paul and Elinor each reach a crisis in their relationships until finally, in the first few days of war, they turn to each other. 
 
Paul's new life as a volunteer for the Belgian Red Cross is a world away from his days at the Slade. The longer he remains in Ypres, the greater the distance between himself and home becomes, and by the time he returns, Paul must confront the fact that life, and love, will never be the same again.

The Silence of the Girls

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? 
 
THE PERFECT GIFT 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.

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

Queen Briseis has been stolen from her conquered homeland and given as a concubine to a foreign warrior. The warrior is Achilles: famed hero, loathed enemy, ruthless butcher, darkly troubled spirit. Briseis's fate is now indivisibly entwined with his. 
 
No one knows it yet, but there are just ten weeks to go until the Fall of Troy, the end of this long and bitter war. This is the start of The Iliad: the most famous war story ever told. The next ten weeks will be a story of male power, male ego, male violence. But what of the women? The thousands of female slaves in the soldiers' camp - in the laundry, at the loom, laying out the dead? Briseis is one of their number - and she will be our witness to history.

Pat Barker

Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished . . . few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker . . . this bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristic blend of brusque wisdom and piercing compassion, Barker remakes it for our times

Stirring and colourful . . . Barker has a genius for world-building. Ritsa is our viewpoint into an ancient civilisation brought carefully to life

A remarkable series of novels . . . Pat Barker’s Trojan War books are a visceral experience, made all the more affecting for being told from the perspective of the women involved rather than the warriors and gods we’re used to

Rich and electrifying . . . The Voyage Home’s storytelling is focused, propulsive and firmly contemporary, plotting a gripping route through Homer’s source material to expose the ripple effects of male violence and destruction

Extremely gory and surprisingly funny, with plenty of gruff wit . . . Few living British novelists write as well about the collateral damage of war as Pat Barker. The Voyage Home is the third novel in her brilliantly subversive and ever-relevant reimagining of The Iliad . . . and it shows how a Bronze Age story can hold up a mirror to the inequities of our modern world

A gritty Greek Game of Thrones . . . Agamemnon’s fateful return home reads like a blockbuster in the colourful third instalment of Barker’s women-centred Trojan wars series

A novelist matchless in her imaginative and informed response to war

The Voyage Home brings forgotten female characters into sharp psychological focus. It is astonishingly fresh and modern, bristling with anger, and breezily quick to read. Pat Barker is one of the finest novelists working today

In her thrilling retelling of the stories of Cassandra and Clytemnestra, Barker conjures up a world stained by the grief of mothers and daughters. Agamemnon’s palace is the stuff of nightmares, a world of suspicion and fear, plagued by the ghosts of innocents

A tale for our time, wonderfully written . . . The Voyage Home lays out the contingency of power: how fickle it is, how readily it ditches its host and moves elsewhere. It lays out both the banality of evil, and the grace that appears in the lives of everyday people

Another sparkily down-to-earth take on Greek myth, which dramatises the bloody reckoning between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra

Told from a female, indeed feminist perspective, Barker’s novel offers a vibrant counterpoint to Homer’s original story

The queen of literary historical fiction, Barker is an unflinching guide for a trip across ancient Greece

Viscerally satisfying, chilling and triumphant . . . No one does it quite like [Pat Barker] does

Thank goodness Pat Barker writes sequences, as one book is never enough. The tortuous grief of mothers and daughters is the story of every war, and her retelling of the aftermath of the Trojan War grips our heart and haunts our dreams

After ten blood-filled years, the war is over. Troy lies in smoking ruins as the victorious Greeks fill their ships with the spoils of battle. 
 
Alongside the treasures looted are the many Trojan women captured by the Greeks – among them the legendary prophetess Cassandra, and her watchful maid, Ritsa. Enslaved as concubine – war-wife – to King Agamemnon, Cassandra is plagued by visions of his death – and her own – while Ritsa is forced to bear witness to both Cassandra’s frenzies and the horrors to come. 
 
Meanwhile, awaiting the fleet’s return is Queen Clytemnestra, vengeful wife of Agamemnon. Heart-shattered by her husband’s choice to sacrifice their eldest daughter to the gods in exchange for a fair wind to Troy, she has spent this long decade plotting retribution, in a palace haunted by child-ghosts. 
 
As one wife journeys toward the other, united by the vision of Agamemnon’s death, one thing is certain: this long-awaited homecoming will change everyone’s fates forever.

Pat Barker

Praise for The Voyage Home

Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished . . . few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker . . . this bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristi ...

Stirring and colourful . . . Barker has a genius for world-building. Ritsa is our viewpoint into an ancient civilisation brought carefully to life

A remarkable series of novels . . . Pat Barker’s Trojan War books are a visceral experience, made all the more affecting for being told from the perspective of the women involved rather than the warriors and gods we ...

Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished . . . few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker . . . this bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristi ...

Stirring and colourful . . . Barker has a genius for world-building. Ritsa is our viewpoint into an ancient civilisation brought carefully to life

A remarkable series of novels . . . Pat Barker’s Trojan War books are a visceral experience, made all the more affecting for being told from the perspective of the women involved rather than the warriors and gods we ...

Brilliant, masterful, strikingly accomplished . . . few come close to matching the sharp perspicacity and profound humanity of Pat Barker . . . this bloody tale has reverberated down the ages. With her characteristi ...

Stirring and colourful . . . Barker has a genius for world-building. Ritsa is our viewpoint into an ancient civilisation brought carefully to life

A remarkable series of novels . . . Pat Barker’s Trojan War books are a visceral experience, made all the more affecting for being told from the perspective of the women involved rather than the warriors and gods we ...

Books by Pat Barker

Series by Pat Barker

Regeneration3 Books

The Life Class Trilogy3 Books

Articles featuring Pat Barker

New historical fiction books to read in 2025

9 holiday reads set in Greece

The best novels based on mythology from around the world

Books that defined the 1990s

Pat Barker on The Iliad: Men do not hear women’s silences

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