Haynes previously reimagined the Oedipus story in her 2017 novel The Children of Jocasta. Now Haynes, who has a background in classics, provides a bold choral retelling of the Iliad that’s panoramic and playful yet makes a serious comment on war and its true cost. From the Odyssey Madeline Miller’s Circespotlights the sorceress who detains Odysseus on his way back from Troy both are shortlisted for the Women’s prize. Pat Barker gave Briseis, a minor character in Homer’s epic, a powerful narrative voice of her own in The Silence of the Girls. Recently we’ve seen a wave of novels that offer a new slant on its male-centred vision. H omer’s Iliad, as Natalie Haynes notes in the afterword to A Thousand Ships, is rightly regarded as “one of the great foundational texts on war and warriors, men and masculinity”.
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