The Voyage Home

Product Information

Clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling beauty, impressively bleak. 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' i paper 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. 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.

The new novel centres on the fate of Cassandra,the daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be heeded. When she refuses to have sex with Apolloafter he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.The Women Of Troy's immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker's precise, elegant writing' Metro Continuing the story of the captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks, The Voyage Home centres on the fate of Cassandra – daughter of King Priam, priestess of Apollo, and a prophet condemned never to be believed. (When she refuses to have sex with Apollo, after he has kissed her, granting her the gift of true prophecy, he spits in her mouth to make sure she will never be believed.) The third book in her acclaimed series reimagining the Iliad story from the perspective of the Trojan women, which began with The Silence of the Girls. Psychologically complex and dangerously driven, Cassandra's arrival in Mycenae will set in motion a bloody train of events, drawing in King Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra and daughter Electra. Agamemnon's triumphant return from Troy is far from the celebration he imagined, and the fate of the Trojan women as uncertain as they had feared.

A powerfully thought-provoking portrait of modern warfare from one of the modern masters of war fiction The Voyage Home will continue the story ofthe captured Trojan women as they set sail for Mycenae with the victorious Greeks. Publishing director Simon Prosseracquired British and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander.Barker aims to complete the novel by the end of 2022, for publication in August 2023.Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human' Herald Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths.

The characters grab hold at the beginning and never loosen their grip. Barker holds us by the sheer beauty of her writing' Financial Times It is grim. The words “filthy” and “stained” recur. Even the sea is foul, yellowish-grey and full of dead things. War is dirty and ugly and smelly and Barker never lets us forget it. Men may set out in the morning oiled and glorious as Phoebus Apollo, their chariots glittering, but at nightfall “ash-grey men driving dirty horses would emerge from the clouds of dust”. Helen - poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace - and she was just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over. The masterful second novel in Pat Barker's classic 'Regeneration' trilogy - f rom the Booker Prize-winning and Women's Prize-shortlisted author of The Silence of the GirlsBarker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday Times 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