Troy for Girls and Boys

Modern reinterpretations of Homer and Troy are all the rage, but they come in many guises. David Malouf’s Ransom (2009) turns a single episode, Priam’s recovery of Hector’s body from Achilles, into a taut novel. Alice Oswald’s Memorial (2018) weaves the Iliad’s descriptions of individual deaths into a profoundly moving catalogue of remembrance. Recent revisionist novels – Madeleine Miller’s Circe (2018), Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls (2018) and Natalie Haynes’s A Thousand Ships (2019) – seek to amplify marginalized voices.