Month: November 2018

A wonderfully unsettling exploration of guilt and its insidious power to wreak people’s lives. Helen escapes her mundane life to work for a charity in the Phillipines. Unexpectedly, she falls in love but tragically, through “her own pride and cowardice”, betrays her lover and he is condemned to prison. Trying to flee her guilt, Helen exiles herself in Prague, denies all pleasures and eeks out a humble existence. She is befriended by Karel and Thea but their lives are thrown … Read more

The Silence of the Girls is an imaginative and ambitious re-telling of The Iliad. It takes a confident, not to say brave, author to base a novel on the greatest legend of Western culture, but Pat Barker has already created a highly regarded body of work and The Silence of the Girls will undoubtedly enhance her reputation. The story is narrated by Briseis, concubine and slave of Achilles, a minor character in the original text but at the centre of … Read more