Penguin presents the audiobook release of The Silence of girls by Pat Barker, read by Kristin Atherton and Michael Fox.

A Guardian Best Publication of the 21st Century

In the Booker Prize-winning writer of Regeneration and among our greatest contemporary writers on war comes a re-imagining of the most famous conflict in literature – the legendary Trojan War.

The fantastic city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, about The Silence of girls: Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2019 an other woman is certainly watching and waiting around: Briseis. She was a queen of the land until Achilles sacked her town and murdered her hubby and sons. Today she actually is Achilles’ concubine: a award of battle.

Briseis is just one among a large number of ladies backstage with this battle – the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who construct the deceased – all of them voiceless ever sold. But, though nobody knows it yet, they are simply ten weeks from the loss of life of Achilles and the Fall of Troy, a finish to this lengthy and bitter issue. Briseis will dsicover everything – and she’ll bear witness.