The Songs of the Kings » (1ST US)

Barry Unsworth, who won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, was a Booker Prize finalist for Morality Play and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize for The Ruby in Her Navel. He lives in Italy.

"Pure gold....One of the best books by this most versatile of writers."—Penelope Lively

The New Yorker

A stubborn wind from the northeast ushers in rough times for the House of Atreus, and the Greek ships, en route to Troy, remain trapped in the straits at Aulis. Unsworth's retelling of the story, familiar from Euripides, of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia to appease the gods so that the boats can sail is a bold, modern tale with cynical riffs on the themes of duty and power, truth and fiction. His Greek warriors are schemers and media-savvy self-promoters who are desperate to look good in the sung reports that are their equivalent of the news media -- songs that are, we realize, the seeds of the Homeric tradition. As Odysseus says, "Once things get into the Song you will never entirely succeed in getting them out again."