New historical fiction books to read in 2025

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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 
 
The extraordinary retelling of one of the greatest Greek myths told through the women of the Trojan war - from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Silence of the Girls. Perfect for fans of The Odyssey and Madeline Miller's Circe and Song of Achilles. 
 
'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.

Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her late thirties, when she took a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. She has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy which includes the Booker Prize-winning The Ghost Road. The Silence of the Girls was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. The Voyage Home continues the series.

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 
 
There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan War whose voice has been silent - until now. Discover the powerful Greek myth retelling from the Sunday Times bestselling author, perfect for fans of The Odyssey and Madeline Miller's Circe and Song of Achilles. 
 
'Chilling, powerful, audacious' The Times 
 
'Magnificent. You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers' Evening Standard 
 
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? 
 
*Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Costa Novel Award* 
 
'This feminist retelling of the Iliad through the lens of ordinary Greek women is as good as it gets. Clever, cool, devastating' Sabine Durrant, The Week 
 
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.

Noonday

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
The final 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 
 
'Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable, with luminous and unsparing insight' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever... Noonday is in the first rank' Mail on Sunday 
 
'[There is] no end to her talent in describing how conflicts rupture the soul' Arifa Akbar, Independent 
 
London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambulance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-surface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life. 
 
The Life Class trilogy: 
Life Class 
Toby's Room 
Noonday

Publisher's description. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of Blitz-era London to electrifying life in Noonday, the third and final novel in her 'Life Class Trilogy'. Bombs are falling on London and, still suffering from the losses of the Great War, Elinor, Paul and Kit must face war's horrors once again...

Barker's command of detail and gift for metaphor are as sharp as ever: her evocation of the bombed city is steeped in drama... Noonday is in the first rank

This is the first time the author of the Regeneration Trilogy has written about the Second World War and it's a triumph

Many strokes of genius from Barker... accessible and moving

Noonday's Blitz-era setting gives Barker ample opportunity to do what she does best

Powerful and vivid, with nuanced characters and Barker's unerring eye for detail

Bold, hard-hitting, unforgettable... a virtuoso rendition of the bombing, as huge swathes of London blaze away with the brightest of bright lights... Barker shows us how the city's finest moment was indubitably also its most terrifying, with luminous and unsparing insight

Ambitious, vivid, sharp... The closer you get to the end, the more lives need saving and the more thwarted and complicated the domestic backdrop... Barker's chronological leap is a sophisticated bridge between the drama of the present and the haunted history of the past

Colourfully alive, fizzes with energy... the novel's point of view swivel[s] like a torchbeam to illuminate London's devastated streets

The book has its own inherent power thanks to Barker's skilful rendering of the texture of the period but it is richer and more rewarding if read with the other two volumes of this beautifully crafted trilogy

London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. Ambulance drivers Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville ferry injured survivors from bombsites to hospitals while Elinor's husband Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, now all three find themselves caught in another war. And as the bombing intensifies, old loves and obsessions resurface until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. 
 
Completing the story of Elinor, Paul and Kit that began with Life Class and continued with Toby's Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London to electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy.

The Regeneration Trilogy

The Booker Prize-winning modern classic of contemporary war fiction from the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
Recommended by Richard Osman 
 
'One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction' Jonathan Coe 
 
'Original, delicate and unforgettable' Independent 
 
'A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 
 
1917, Scotland. At Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, army psychiatrist William Rivers treats shell-shocked soldiers before sending them back to the front. In his care are poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, and Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. . . 
 
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road follow the stories of these men until the last months of the war. Widely acclaimed and admired, Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy paints with moving detail the far-reaching consequences of a conflict which decimated a generation. 
 
The Regeneration trilogy: 
Regeneration 
The Eye in the Door 
The Ghost Road

Harrowing, original, delicate and unforgettable

A masterpiece . . . fiction of the highest order

A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians. Constantly surprising and formally superb

One of the few real masterpieces of late twentieth-century British fiction

One of the most distinguished works of contemporary fiction

Pat Barker's award-winning Regeneration Trilogy - comprising Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road - is the heart-rending story of the last two years of the First World War seen through the eyes of army psychologist William Rivers and damaged soldier Billy Prior. 
 
As Rivers struggles with the responsibility of helping the men in his charge - including the traumatized poet Siegfried Sassoon - only to see them returned to the front, we see how an entire generation of young men was brutalized by the horrors of the trenches.

Toby's Room

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
The second novel in Pat Barker's acclaimed 'Life Class' trilogy - a dark and compelling examination of desire, friendship and the horror of war, from one of our greatest writers on war and the human heart 
 
'Heart-rending... Toby's Room anatomises a world where extreme emotion shatters the boundaries of identity, behaviour, gender' Independent 
 
'Once again Barker skilfully moves between past and present, seamlessly weaving fact and fiction into a gripping narrative' Sunday Telegraph 
 
When Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then can she finally close the door to Toby's room. Moving from the Slade School of Art to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the rebuilding of the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity, damage, intimacy and loss. 
 
The Life Class trilogy: 
Life Class 
Toby's Room 
Noonday

War evokes memories that many would soon rather forget. But when it takes Elinor's brother, Toby, the past becomes an irrepressible force -- and the only one that can unravel the mysteries behind Toby's final days on the battlefield. How exactly did her brother die, and why? 
 
Elinor goes to those around her for help -- but they, too, are fiercely guarding secrets of their own. Her classmate Kit, a witness to Toby's death, holds a vital key to what happened, but he is in no mood to talk. Enlisting the help of her former lover Paul, Elinor determines to uncover the truth -- but at what cost? More importantly, what was the clandestine affair that had taken place between the siblings in 1912, and what will it mean for everyone when Toby's ghosts finally catch up to them? 
 
Moving from the Slade School of Art before the First World War to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the attempt to rebuild the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.

Double Vision

In Double Vision Pat Barker returns to the subject of war.

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
A powerfully thought-provoking portrait of modern warfare from one of the modern masters of war fiction 
 
'Barker is one of our most significant contemporary novelists' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The characters grab hold at the beginning and never loosen their grip. Barker holds us by the sheer beauty of her writing' Financial Times 
 
'Barker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday Times 
 
Returning to Afghanistan after his photographer friend is killed by a sniper, war reporter Stephen Sharkey seeks release from his nightmares in an England seemingly at peace with itself. Questioning man's inhumanity to man both abroad and at home, and whether love really can be the great redeemer, Double Vision is a searing novel of conflict in modern times.

Insomnia, exhaustion, recurring nightmares - Stephen Sharkey is suffering the aftereffects of his career as a war reporter, most recently in Afghanistan, where Ben Frobisher, war photographer and friend, has been shot dead on assignment. Hanging up his flak jacket and turning his back on the everyday reality of war, Stephen moves into a quiet and peaceful cottage in the north of England. It seems the perfect environment in which to write his book on the representations of war - one that will be based largely on Ben Frobisher's work. But Stephen's supposed isolation offers no protection from other people's suffering or the shattering effects of human brutality . . .

Border Crossing

An unflinching novel on the nature of evil from the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
'Rich, surprising, breathtaking' The Times 
 
'A tremendous piece of writing, sad and terrifying. It keeps you reading, exhausted and blurry-eyed, until 2am' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Barker probes not only the mysteries of 'evil' but society's horrified and incoherent response to it' Guardian 
 
'Brilliantly crafted. Unflinching yet sensitive, this is a dark story expertly told' Daily Mail 
 
When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller. When Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. 
 
Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

When Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, plunges into a river to save a young man from drowning, he unwittingly reopens a chapter from his past he'd hoped to forget. For Tom already knows Danny Miller - when Danny was ten Tom helped imprison him for the killing of an old woman. Now out of prison with a new identity, Danny has some questions - questions he thinks only Tom can answer. Reluctantly, Tom is drawn back into Danny's world - a place where the border between good and evil, innocence and guilt is blurred and confused. But when Danny's demands on Tom become extreme, Tom wonders whether he has crossed a line of his own - and in crossing it, can he ever go back?

Another World

From the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the Girls 
 
'Gripping in the best, most exquisite sense of the word' Mail on Sunday 
 
'Utterly compelling... She is a novelist who probes deep, revealing what people prefer to keep hidden' Scotsman 
 
'Extraordinary... Without question the best novel I have read this year' Daily Mail 
 
'Brilliant touches of observation, an unfailing ear for dialogue... This is a novel that doesn't allow you to miss a sentence' New York Times Book Review 
 
At 101 years old, Geordie, a proud Somme veteran, lingers painfully through the days before his death. His grandson Nick is anguished to see this once-resilient man haunted by the ghosts of the trenches and the horror surrounding his brother's death. But in Nick's family home the dark pressures of the past also encroach on the present. As he and his wife Fran try to unite their uneasy family of step- and half-siblings, the discovery of a sinister Victorian drawing reveals the murderous history of their house and casts a violent shadow on their lives...

Nick's grandfather Geordie lies dying. As Nick watches, Geordie starts to relive the horrors surrounding his brother's death and his own terrible experiences during the First World War. Meanwhile, Nick and his wife Fran are trying to unite their increasingly fractious young family, despite the discovery of an obscene Victorian drawing which reveals the tragic history of their house and casts a terrifying shadow over the family.

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

The stories of the ancient world retold from the perspective of overlooked female characters is a publishing cliché. Thank goodness for Pat Barker, who shows how it’s done . . .  Bloody, earthy, vivid, gruff and surprisingly funny

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

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

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