Not a fanI loved Circe, didn't love The Song of Achilles.
The Song of Achilles (2011)
Others: Mostly positive This is the story of the seige of Troy from the perspective of Achilles best-friend Patroclus. Although Patroclus is outcast from his home for disappointing his father he manages to be the only mortal who can keep up with the half-God Archilles. Even though many will know the facts behind the story the telling is fresh and engaging.
- ISBN:
- 9780062060617
- Length:
- 379 pages
Genres: historical fiction
Lists: …
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The silence of the girls
Pat Barker
2018 · 325 pages · 10 reviews
Others: Mostly positive"From the Booker Prize-winning author of the Regeneration trilogy comes a monumental new masterpiece, set in the midst of literature's most famous war. Pat Barker turns her attention to the timeless legend of The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War. The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, who continue to wage bloody war over a stolen woman--Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman watches and waits for the war's outcome: Briseis. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers. Briseis becomes Achilles's concubine, a prize of battle, and must adjust quickly in order to survive a radically different life, as one of the many conquered women who serve the Greek army. When Agamemnon, the brutal political leader of the Greek forces, demands Briseis for himself, she finds herself caught between the two most powerful of the Greeks. Achilles refuses to fight in protest, and the Greeks begin to lose ground to their Trojan opponents. Keenly observant and cooly unflinching about the daily horrors of war, Briseis finds herself in an unprecedented position to observe the two men driving the Greek forces in what will become their final confrontation, deciding the fate, not only of Briseis's people, but also of the ancient world at large. Briseis is just one among thousands of women living behind the scenes in this war--the slaves and prostitutes, the nurses, the women who lay out the dead--all of them erased by history. With breathtaking historical detail and luminous prose, Pat Barker brings the teeming world of the Greek camp to vivid life. She offers nuanced, complex portraits of characters and stories familiar from mythology, which, seen from Briseis's perspective, are rife with newfound revelations. Barker's latest builds on her decades-long study of war and its impact on individual lives--and it is nothing short of magnificent"-- "The Iliad, as experienced by the captured women living in the Greek camp in the final weeks of the Trojan War"--
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Also historical fiction59%On 5+ of the same lists31%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations10%Wolf Hall
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2009 · 653 pages · 7 reviews
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1987 · 288 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Mostly positiveToni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs' "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her...in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept...in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom...and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe's struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present--and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past--is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.
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1989 · 245 pages · 7 reviews
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Not a fan
Not a fanI will say mythology romances have not worked for me in the past. I did read Song of Achilles, and I didn't love it.
Review 1 of 4
Loved itI read this sobbing my mother freaking eyes out at 2:00 in the morning because, well, it just affected me that deeply. But also, I couldn't put the book down.
Review 1 of 3
Loved itmy copy is still water damaged from my tears and so it's going to the top of my Tears we meet again
Review 1 of 2
Loved itthis is a beautiful story of love of companionship of coming of age the writing style of this book is also just stunning
Review 1 of 4
Mixedsong of Achilles I'm gonna put in cell phones on silent because it was good
Loved iti loved this book so much i would say this is the best like romance that i have read ever
Loved itthis book is heartbreaking you will probably cry but honestly it is a journey and the writing is just perfection i instantly fell in love with achilles and patroclus's love story
Review 1 of 3
Loved itsong of achilles was just fantastic i basically listened to this in one day she just does such really great kind of mythology retellings
Loved itThe song of Achilles is the story of Achilles and Patroclus and how they grow up and this is definitely a tragic love story I hosted a book club for this book I just loved the writing style of both of these I devoured them I cried a lot while reading this.
Loved itI read the Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller's first book, back in December. And I'm so glad that I read it when I did because I was like so in love with her writing that I couldn't wait read more.
Review 1 of 2