Editions

The Silence of the Girls

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241983201

  • Length: 336  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 20mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 236g

  • RRP: £8.99

The Silence of the Girls

  • Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Regeneration

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Costa Novel Award and the International DUBLIN Literary Award

There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan war whose voice has been silent - till now. Discover the greatest Greek myth of all - retold by the witness that history forgot . . .

'Magnificent. You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers' Evening Standard
'Chilling, powerful, audacious' The Times

Briseis was a queen until her city was destroyed. Now she is slave to Achilles, 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?

  • Imprint: Penguin

  • ISBN: 9780241983201

  • Length: 336  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 20mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 236g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • 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

    The Times

  • A stunning return to form

    Observer

  • 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

    Irish Times

  • 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

    Evening Standard

  • An assured triumph

    Sunday Times

  • 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

    Guardian

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

    Daily Telegraph

  • 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

    Independent

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

    Woman and Home

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

    Edith Hall

More from this Author

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About the Author

Pat Barker

Pat Barker was born in Yorkshire and began her literary career in her forties, when she took a short writing course taught by Angela Carter. Encouraged by Carter to continue writing, she sent her fiction out. Thirty-five years later, she has published sixteen novels, including her masterful Regeneration Trilogy, been made a CBE for services to literature, and won the UK's highest literary honour, the Booker Prize. Her last novel, The Silence of the Girls, began the story of Briseis, the forgotten woman at the heart of one of the most famous war epics ever told. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Costa Novel Award and the Gordon Burn Prize, and won an Independent Bookshop Award 2019. The Women of Troy continues that story. Pat Barker lives in Durham.

Pat Barker

Read more

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Features

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

In The Silence of the Girls, Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker gives voice to the voiceless characters of The Iliad
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Podcasts

Writing the First World War feat. Jeremy Paxman, Robert Graves and Pat Barker

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