Before turning her attention to ancient Greece , Pat Barker was best known for her literary evocations of 20 th century war. Her Regeneration trilogy, written in the early 1990s, examined the psychological toll of the First World War , with the final instalment, The Ghost Road , winning the Booker Prize . With her latest book, The Voyage Home , Barker completes another trilogy, a rich and electrifying reimagining of Homer’s The Iliad told from a female perspective .
Where the first two instalments, 2018’s The Silence of the Girls and 2021’s The Women of Troy , documented the aftermath of the Trojan war through the eyes of the captured queen Briseis, the third centres on Ritsa, a fictional slave, and her mistress Cassandra, the kidnapped Trojan priestess forced to become the concubine of King Agamemnon. We join Ritsa and Cassandra as they board the Medusa , a “battered old sick bucket” of a ship that has survived a decade of war and is now headed back to the Greek kingdom of Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra awaits him. His should be a hero’s return, having successfully overseen the razing of Troy and its environs.
But there is unease at how he will be received by the queen since, 10 years prior, Agamemnon killed their daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to the gods in exchange for his army’s safe passage to Troy. Against this tense political and familial backdrop, Barker tells an intimate story of the captive priestess and her maid, both still traum.