Trojan Women: A Novel of the Fall of Troy - Softcover

By the author of Achilles: A Love Story When men make war, it is women who suffer. Trojan Women is a gripping re-imaging of one of the greatest stories in western literature, the epic clash of cultures we call the Trojan War. As Homer tells it in the Iliad, men fight, suffer, and die. There men tell the tale. But the Trojan women, whose lives are at the center of Homer's tale and who are the prizes to be won, are silent. Trojan Women gives these women a voice. In this moving, carefully researched, and elegantly written historical novel, six legendary women tell the story: Chryseis, captured and taken as a slave to the bed of Agamemnon, bravely and resourcefully confronts the horrors of war and the brutality of men. Captured with her and saved from death by her, Briseis stands side by side with Chryseis when death threatens them. Slaves and playthings of the Greeks, the two women are at the moral and emotional center of the drama and tell a story that even Homer never knew. From within the besiged city of Troy, Queen Hecabe, and her daughters Andromache and Kassandra, look from the walls at the vast Greek army camped below, and bravely face the terrors that confront them: for Hecabe the loss of a crown and kingdom, for Andromache the loss of husband and child, for Kassandra the loss of sanity itself. Once desired and now despised, Helen, the prize over whom Greeks and Trojans fight, has lost eveything and now can only wait to learn if she will live or die. Trojan Women renews for our times an epic story, yet one also intimate and passionate, that remains, after two thousand years, perhaps the greatest story ever told. Read Byrne Fone's latest novel: American Revolution.

BYRNE FONE has written three novels in the Trojan Trilogy, "War Stories," "Trojan Woman," and "Achilles: A Love Story." His other books include "The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature," A Road to Stonewall: Homosexuality and Homophobia in British and American Literature," "Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text," "Homophobia: A History" and "Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait." He lives in France.