Women of Troy

Pat Barker

In the final year of the Trojan War, Briseis is taken from her home and claimed as a prize by Achilles, becoming a pawn in the bitter conflict between him and Agamemnon. Through her eyes, the celebrated world of Greek heroes is transformed into a brutal landscape of enslavement, violence, grief, and survival, where the women captured in war are too often reduced to silence. Moving between Briseis’s perspective and that of the warriors around her, the novel reimagines the Iliad from the side of the defeated and dispossessed. Fierce, intimate, and unflinching, it explores whose stories are remembered—and whose are erased.