The Voyage Home

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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. Stubborn Amina, with her gaze still fixed on the ruined towers of Troy, determined to avenge the slaughter of her king. 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. Following her bestselling, critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker continues her extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest myths. The Women Of Troy's immediate beauty is its accessibility and Barker's precise, elegant writing' Metro A new vision of what the First World War did to human beings, male and female, soldiers and civilians' A. S. Byatt, Daily Telegraph 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”.

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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

Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors - all they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind has vanished, the seas becalmed by vengeful gods, and so the warriors remain in limbo - camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, kept company by the women they stole from it.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.) Masterful and enduringly resonant, ambitious and intimate, The Women of Troy continues Pat Barker's extraordinary retelling of one of our greatest classical myths, following on from the critically acclaimed The Silence of the Girls. 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. Barker has a quite extraordinary ability to combine complexity and clarity and to make both seem parts of the same whole' Sunday Times You go to her for plain truths, a driving storyline and a clear eye, steadily facing the history of our world' Guardian