Retells the events leading up to the Trojan War including Helen's capture by Paris and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis.

Retells the events leading up to the Trojan War including Helen's capture by Paris and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis.

Retells the events leading up to the Trojan War including Helen's capture by Paris and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis.

A daring and timely feminist retelling of The Iliad from the perspective of the women of Troy who endured it—an extraordinary follow up to The Silence of the Girls from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Regeneration Trilogy and “one of contemporary literature’s most thoughtful and compelling writers" (The Washington Post). Troy has fallen and the victorious Greeks are eager to return home with the spoils of an endless war—including the women of Troy themselves. They await a fair wind for the Aegean. It does not come, because the gods are offended. The body of King Priam lies unburied and desecrated, and so the victors remain in suspension, camped in the shadows of the city they destroyed as the coalition that held them together begins to unravel. Old feuds resurface and new suspicions and rivalries begin to fester. Largely unnoticed by her captors, the one time Trojan queen Briseis, formerly Achilles's slave, now belonging to his companion Alcimus, quietly takes in these developments. She forges alliances when she can, with Priam's aged wife the defiant Hecuba and with the disgraced soothsayer Calchas, all the while shrewdly seeking her path to revenge.

Theo and Leon Smith are flying to Athens with their parents to attend the Olympic Games when, passing Mount Olympus, the aeroplane is intercepted and embroiled in an ancient Greek battle that has raged for thousands of years. Forced to land, the captain is confronted with a conundrum in the clouds that could only have been created by some immortal force. Theo and Leon, fascinated by ancient Greece, are willing participants in the awesome but scary events that follow. Numerous criminals and a net full of birds imprisoned in the clouds by the gods are the source of the terror. Rescued and returned to Athens, the task of helping them to acclimatize to the twenty-first century falls to the Smith family and various academics. While visiting the ruins of Olympia with their ancient friends, the boys find themselves in Ancient Olympia with the race about to start. The all-important victor's speech is interrupted by the unceremonious arrival of Theo's teacher, instigating a series of perilous recriminations. Their lives are endangered many times as they become involved in the bloody battles and rituals of ancient Greece. Tragedy and redemption do not strike, however, until Theo and Leon return to Athens, AD 2004, in time for the Olympic Games.

As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close on three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield. Because of her double marriage to the Greek King Menelaus and the Trojan Prince Paris, Helen was held responsible for an enduring enmity between East and West. For millennia she has been viewed as ane xquisite agent of extermination. But who was she?