The Voyage Home

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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. 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.

Barker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday Times Barker is a writer of crispness and clarity and an unflinching seeker of the germ of what it means to be human' Herald 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

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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. The characters grab hold at the beginning and never loosen their grip. Barker holds us by the sheer beauty of her writing' Financial Times The Women Of Troy's immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker's precise, elegant writing' Metro

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. 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.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.)