A searing twist on The Iliad… Amid the recent slew of rewritings of the great Greek myths and classics, Barker’s stands out for its forcefulness of purpose and earthy compassion… Chilling, powerful, audacious

A stunning return to form

Angry, thoughtful, sad, deeply humane and compulsively readable, The Silence of the Girls shows that 36 years after her first novel was published, Barker is a writer at the peak of her powers

Its magnificent final section can’t help but make you reflect on the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, the women throughout history who have been told by men to forget their trauma… You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers

An assured triumph

An important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliad but at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, and at how anger and hatred play out in our societies

She gives a voice to the voiceless…The Silence of the Girls is a book that will be read in generations to come

An impressive feat of literary revisionism that should be on the Man Booker longlist… This is a story about the very real cost of wars waged by men… Barker makes us re-think history

Giving voice to the voiceless, this is a gripping feat of imagination that succeeds in being relevant today

The most important novel based on The Iliad so far this century

The magic of Barker’s book is that the resonance of giving silenced women a voice at the centre of the story is just as relevant today

[Pat Barker] is one of our finest modern chroniclers of war…this magisterial novel is both a timely exploration of power, misogyny and violence and an elegant counternarrative to one of literature’s founding conflicts