Natalie Haynes

"With her trademark passion, wit, and fierce feminism, Natalie Haynes gives much-needed voice to the silenced women of the Trojan War."--Madeline Miller, author of Circe Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, a gorgeous retelling of the Trojan War from the perspectives of the many women involved in its causes and consequences--for fans of Madeline Miller. This is the women's war, just as much as it is the men's. They have waited long enough for their turn . . . This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . . In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen. From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war. A woman's epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world's great tale ever told. --Madeline Miller, author of Circe

A Novel

A Thousand Ships

Samantha Murguia

When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else. 

Amira BEN

sharkie

The Greeks were being punished for their impiety, for their senseless refusal to accept that Troy would not fall, could not fall to mortal men. Not to men like these, these arrogant Greeks with their tall ships and their bronze armour, glinting in the sun because not one of them could tolerate the notion that he should labour in obscurity, unseen and unadmired.

No one believed their pretext: that they had come to claim back some woman who had run off with one of Priam’s boys. The idea was laughable.

Ten years of a conflict whose heroes had already made their way into the songs of poets, and victory belonged to none of the men who had fought outside the walls, not Achilles nor Hector, both long since dead. Instead, it belonged to the man they had found hiding in the reeds, near the horse, who said his name was–she could not remember. A hissing sound, like a snake.

Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son.

‘Is that the only measure of greatness? Killing so many that you have lost count? Making no distinction between warriors and unarmed men and women?’

Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.

And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she?

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war–all ten years of it–might be distilled into that.

 But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain–the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men–and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

A Thousand Ships quotes

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