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Hamish Hamilton to publish sequel to Barker's The Silence of the Girls
Hamish Hamilton has acquired Pat Barker's The Women of Troy, the "eagerly awaited" sequel to The Silence of the Girls (Penguin, 2019).
Simon Prosser, publishing director, bought British and Commonwealth volume rights from Clare Alexander at Aitken Alexander, for publication in August 2021.
The Silence of the Girls won the 2019 Independent Bookshop Week Book Awards Adult Category and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019, among other awards. It has sold 159,359 copies across all editions via Nielsen BookScan's UK TCM.
The synopsis for the sequel reads: "Troy has fallen. The Greeks have won their bitter war. They can return home as victors, loaded with their spoils: their stolen gold, stolen weapons, stolen women. All they need is a good wind to lift their sails. But the wind does not come. The gods have been offended — the body of Trojan king Priam lies desecrated, unburied — and so the victors remain in limbo, camped in the shadow of the city they destroyed, pacing at the edge of an unobliging sea. And, in these empty, restless days, the hierarchies that held them together begin to fray, old feuds resurface and new suspicions fester.
"Amidst her squabbling captors, Briseis — now married to Alcimus, but carrying the child of the late, great Achilles — must forge alliances where she can: with young, dangerously naïve Amina, with defiant, aged Hecuba, and with wild-eyed Cassandra, the unheeded seer. And so begins the path to a kind of revenge. Briseis has survived the Trojan War, but peacetime may turn out to be even more dangerous..."
Prosser commented: "What a magnificent follow-up to The Silence of the Girls this is. From its bravura beginning, within the very belly of the Trojan Horse, to its stirring end, on the shores of the Aegean Sea, this retelling and reimagining of the continuing journey of Briseis both grips and moves. The Trojan War may be over, but the dangers for the women of Troy, enslaved now within the Greek camp, are only sharper."
Barker said: "I am delighted to be working once again with the excellent team at Hamish Hamilton who did such a brilliant job of publishing The Silence of the Girls."
