Natalie Haynes has long been responsible for my classical education via her wonderful Radio 4 series Natalie Haynes Stands Up For The Classics, yet I hadn't realised that she was also a novelist until I saw A Thousand Ships pop up on Netgalley. Haynes has always had a real gift for retelling ancient mythology, her passion and enthusiasm is truly contagious. Yet while contemporary retellings of female characters from legends have been popular in recent years, authors generally zoom in on one particular character. With A Thousand Ships, Haynes is refusing to be so choosy. Instead, she seeks to grant a voice to every woman connected to the Trojan war. Uniting the voices of such a disparate cast is a bold endeavour, with the obvious risk of some drowning out others. Yet Haynes keeps a steady hand on the tiller, building her characters into a chorus who question what it means to be truly heroic.

Serving as narrator is Calliope, who tells the story while also being bossed around by a poet who is unnamed but can be assumed to be Homer. The novel's opening words are 'Sing, Muse, he says, and the edge in his voice makes it clear that this is not a request'. Right from the beginning, we see what the dynamic is between these women and the men who order their lives. Even as they plead with the gods for assistance, the men expect their demands to be fulfilled. I have read reviews of A Thousand Ships which roll their eyes at Haynes' stated goal of speaking for the 'forgotten' women of the Trojan war, claiming that these women are not unremembered. Yet even when women are mentioned in The Iliad or other similar sources, their interior lives are utterly ignored. Only a very few fight in the battles, they have no agency and they function more as chattel of the male characters than actual living breathing people themselves. As Haynes points out via Calliope, 'war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?'

Haynes' central thesis is that the women within in the Trojan war were not as silent as the ancient writers would have had us believe. The priestess Theano looks at her husband Antenor and knows that she would gladly swap his life, would live merrily as a widow, for the return of any one of her four dead sons. Bitterly, she snaps at him that they both know that the Greeks are hiding in the horse. Antenor responds miserably that nobody will heed his warnings. So Theano orders her husband to go and open the gates for the Greeks. If the city is going to fall, she wants to make sure that her daughter at least remains safe. I have read stories about these two characters before. Antenor, the 'noble' Trojan who advised that Helen be returned to her husband. His wife, sister to Queen Hecabe and guardian of The Luck of Troy. I knew that they were spared during the sack of Troy. The idea that it was due to Theano's furious refusal to be subjected to any further indignity rather than Antenor's treachery was an intriguing spin.

Haynes' story threads back and forth, touching both sides of the conflict. The Trojan women sit and wait for the Greeks to decide what is to be done with them, knowing that things are about to get much worse. Hecabe curses all those who she believes to have escaped. Andromache gives silent thanks that not everyone is in the same accursed situation. Polyxena asks her mother when she first knew that the city would fall. The shadow of rape hangs over them all. They think about when the Amazon fell, and so the reader hears the story of Penthesilea. Hecuba sobs out her guilt that she did not kill Paris in his cradle as the oracle advised. The tragic fate of Polydorus is uncovered. The Greeks come to coax Andromache into handing over her baby. These are dark, bleak, painful stories. Yet when the poet cries to Calliope that these tales hurt too much, the Muse responds crossly, 'It should hurt. She isn't a footnote, she's a person. And she - all the Trojan women - should be memorialised as much as any other person'.

The sting of A Thousand Ships comes from Haynes' strong emotional connection with her characters. The lurching moment as Iphigenia realises she is not walking towards her wedding. The panic as Creusa cannot get out of the city. The blood-freezing chill as Andromache realises that they really are going to kill her little son. That last one makes me cry every time. I started re-reading as while writing my review, swept along by Haynes' undoubtedly engaging prose, but it was all much harder to bear knowing what was in store. It is not that Haynes is ever gratuitous. If anything, she shies away from sexual violence, particularly in contrast to Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls. Where Barker has Chryseis repeatedly brutalised by Agamemnon who is described grimly as 'preferring the back door', Haynes has Briseis slip the younger girl some herbs that will render the high king incapable. A Thousand Ships packs its punch in emphasising the dogged misery and grief of these women's lives. Fewer stinking latrine pits. More monologues and introspection.

I found Haynes' portrayal of Cassandra to be particularly thought-provoking. Over the years she has been slapped and scolded into keeping her voice to a whisper, her constant prophesies given no more heed than the buzzing of a fly. Even when she predicts the fate of Polydorus, the other characters quickly forget that she has done so. Her curse to be forever disbelieved is portrayed here as a claustrophobic nightmare from which she can never escape. Along with the accompanying nausea, vomiting and screaming, she it hardly makes her an appealing companion. Cassandra is another narrator within the novel however, with her visions of the future giving insight into the other characters' ultimate fates.

The tradition has long had it that the men were the heroes. The proof is in the poetry, the tales of they rode into battle. Yet Haynes points out that there is another side. There were two wronged spouses in the Trojan war. Menelaus, the cuckolded husband but also Oenone, the spurned wife. Narrator Calliope remarks that Menalaus 'loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises her son. Which is the more heroic act?' Oenone looks at her beautiful child and wonders how his father can care so little for him. She is not the first mother to have had that thought. In the violent and uncertain world that these women live in, the act of motherhood is one of true heroism.

A Thousand Ships has its lighter moments. Snaking through the novel are the letters from Penelope to her errant husband, heavy with sarcasm and irritation. Did he really need to shout out his true name to the Cyclops? And precisely why is he living as husband to Circe? Hearing regular updates from the bards on her husband's journey home, Penelope has to contain her irritation at yet more delays. To add insult to injury, when visiting the Underworld, she hears that Odysseus asked his dead mother about his father, his son, his honour, his throne and various others and only then, remembered to ask about his wife. Odysseus is having a fine time as the guest of goddesses while his wife brings up their child and tries to keep their household together. Again - which of them is the hero?

There is courage in simply surviving. In continuing to exist despite impossible pain. The men's sufferings end as they breathe their last on the battlefield. When Andromache begs to die with her child, she is told that she belongs to Neoptolemus. Her life is not hers to discard. She is not to be permitted the escape of death. Instead she must serve the man who murdered her beautiful baby. To share his bed. To bear his child. My skin crawls at the very idea. That Andromache lived through it reveals a greater steel in her soul than many of the warriors on the plains of Troy. I was ten when I first read of what befell her. This was years before I learned that her captor had slaughtered her child. I could only ever picture her as a statue. I could not see how a living human could endure such a shift in life. To go from being the beloved wife of Hector, the proud mother of an adored child - to a slave and a concubine? And yet Haynes imagines how Andromache simply adapts. She never comes to love her captor but 'nor could she maintain the visceral loathing she had felt when he first took her from her home. It was not possible to keep hating a man with whom she lived in such close proximity.' His cruelty does not dissipate but 'circumstances forced her to find something in his character that she could tolerate'. Oh Andromache - more than any of the others, my heart aches for you.

A Thousand Ships is not a happy read. In fact, it left me emotionally drained. While the precise facts of the Trojan war are open to dispute, what is certain is that women have suffered in similar ways since the dawning of the world. Where men make war, women are treated like cattle. As in her radio series, Haynes' passionate sympathy for her subjects shines and while her perspective may seem subversive, her writing is firmly rooted in the original sources. These women were always there in the texts but they truly might as well have been statues for all the notice that the poets took. The pain of women is not the story that the world (men) want. Intelligent and insightful, A Thousand Ships sings of the valour and courage of women which is too often taken for granted. Serving as either introduction or intriguing extra, Haynes' novel is a must-read for fans of classical mythology.

I found this book a bit of a mixed bag. There are so many characters... each getting a chapter or more, each getting a perspective on the Trojan war - it's an interesting concept, but with only 350 pages or so to cover them all, inevitably quite a few of them feel a bit empty and not quite finished. The idea that she focuses on female voices about the Trojan war because they are not usually heard is laughable when you think of the number of authors who used these women as main characters in plays and epic poems.
The writing was... nice. Quite detached which means you don't feel much of a connection ti most characters.
Overall it was a book I still enjoyed, but as often with books that cover so many characters, you end up liking some chapters a lot (Cassandra's were very good) and skimming through a few others.

Natalie Haynes’s reframing of The Iliad and The Odyssey from the female perspective is an original and educational read. The chapters from different characters illuminate the backstory to these amazing stories and I enjoyed recollecting these amazing stories that have truly stood the test of time. My personal favourite is the letters Penelope writes to her husband Odysseus which are woven throughout the novel.
I would recommend this as accessible to new readers, but also to readers who enjoyed Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, which also revisit Greek myths from an alternative viewpoint

When I first started this book, I wasn’t sure if I was going to like I to be honest. I do enjoy retellings and in particular ones that involve women. This book is really compelling and gave me all the emotions. It felt thoroughly researched and parts were amusing. Definitely give it a go.

I really enjoyed this! A Thousand Ships did for me what The Silence of the Girls sadly didn’t, which is always a bonus. In particular, I loved the stories of Clytemnestra and of Chryseis and Briseis. The only issue I had was that it was rather choppy. It felt a little too much like individual snapshots of stories whereas I would have liked a bit more linearity and flow to the stories. I’m not overly familiar with Greek mythology so I’m not entirely sure if there was any chronology to the way the stories were presented, but the linearity was my only issue. Otherwise, I respect Haynes for being able to include so much on a topic that gives so much margin for historical error!

I really enjoyed the recently published re-working of Ancient World stories by Pat Barker and Madeleine Miller, not least because of their female perspectives. However, whilst Natalie Haynes has done something similar in ‘A Thousand Ships’, the structure and style of the many vignettes which make up this novel does not encourage the fully immersive experience that is afforded in ‘Circe’ and ‘The Silence of the Girls’.
Haynes is clearly a very knowledgeable academic and broadcaster and in ‘A Thousand Ships’ we are certainly educated in the possible lives of many peripheral women from the original stories. Her ability to weave social, architectural and cultural details into the stories is very successful – all done with the light touch of someone who is entirely at home in the period. However, the novel does lack the in-depth characterisation or the narrative drive of other recent successful re-tellings of The Iliad and The Odyssey. In general, the storytelling is over-reliant on ‘telling’ rather than ‘showing’.
Warning: anyone reading an electronic copy of this novel may well approach it with a sinking heart after digesting the character list provided at the outset. Whilst I’m sure that it’s meant to be helpful, this sort of information only really servers the reader well if it’s as easy to revisit by the easy flicking back of a page!
My thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for a copy of this novel in exchange for a fair review.

This was such a fascinating and compelling read which shines a powerful light on all of the forgotten women of the Trojan War, including Cassandra, Penelope, Andromache and many others. Each chapter focuses on a different woman, which made for a slightly choppy structure and which took me a little bit to get used to. However, once I did, I was completely entranced by these stories. Haynes does a fantastic job of giving agency to these women and makes them vital, which I really appreciated. I particularly enjoyed Penelope's letters to Odysseus, which were pitch perfect in tone and often made me smile in what was primarily a pretty depressing book. These women were not well treated, which makes for uncomfortable reading, but necessary as it gives another much needed side to the story. The writing is beautiful and evocative and I really enjoyed the way in which each woman had her own unique voice. Overall, I found this to be a really interesting book that I would highly recommend to anyone with an interest in Ancient Greece.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I was not a fan of this book at all. I found it extremely hard to follow and it left me very confused.
Unfortunately I DNFed this book

Wow! This is truly an epic tale that I will be highly recommending to all of my friends. Those who have recently read and enjoyed (or loved, as I did!) The Silence of the Girls or Circe will adore this. The novel brings mythology and history to life in a visceral and exciting way. The fact that the tales are each told from a female perspective and that the epic novel is a page-turner are added bonuses.
Haynes proves that a modern literary novel about the ancient world doesn’t have to be dry - it can be utterly thrilling and familiar stories can seem totally new in the right hands.
Many thanks to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan and Natalie Haynes for this remarkable read.

A fantastic retelling of the Iliad from multiple female POVs. As a classics graduate this was just amazing to read, I utterly adored it. So many favourite characters - Penelope, Cassandra, Iphigenia (cried at her bit), Clytemnestra - just so good to hear from them.

The iliad itself is not a pacy read - mainly because it was never intended to be read, it's oral story telling - but this retelling was gripping and enthralling and a strong reminder of how difficult life is - and was - for women.

This book reframes the narrative by which the ancient world shows "achievements" - and for women later in history and even in the present day - where just to survive, to remain alive inspite of the very real dangers both external (slavery/rape/war/illness) and internal (pregnancy/birth) - we and they faced.

It's time to reframe the narrative around achievements and stop just telling history but telling herstory and women's achievements despite the barriers.

I adored this book. An all female retelling of th Trojan War, it gives you a perspective on history that we are often not shown. I would recommend this highly to fans of Madeleine Miller.

Natalie Haynes really knows her stuff, and tells a story extremely well. I was pulled in immediately by the voices of the women of the Trojan war - a story we've all heard told in different ways. Haynes tells it from an all female perspective, using unexpected voices alongside the better known ones. The impact of war on women is different to the impact on men, and there are universal experiences of loss and trauma here, but Haynes gives them a particularity. I would thoroughly recommend this book. Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read - and re-read it.

I love Greek Mythology retellings and I loved this retelling of the Trojan War from an all female perspective, Natalie Haynes is a must read for all mythology fans and I can't see wait to see what she does next.

I’m addicted to modern retellings of ancient myths (Mary Renault, Pat Barker, Madeleine Miller et al) and I really enjoyed Natalie Haynes’s ‘The Children of Jocasta’, her reworking of the Oedipus and Antigone stories from the perspective of the female characters. So I snapped up the chance to read her new novel when promoted on the NetGalley review site.

It doesn’t have the traditional, linear plot of ‘The Children of Jocasta’; rather it reads more like a who’s who of the Trojan War, distaff side.

While this approach is interesting and certainly introduced me to characters I knew little about, such as the nymph Oenone and the Amazon Penthisilea, it is a two-edged sword: a series of vignettes of often minor characters doesn’t make for a satisfying read. I wondered where we were going to leap to next.

And, as other readers have found, some of these characters were more compelling than others. Hecabe’s vertiginous drop in status. Polyxena’s grief for her brother Polydorus. These worked well and moved me, as did the fall of Troy when, like Cassandra, one wants to shout out a warning to the Trojans.

These stories have lasted over millennia because we can still relate to them; their themes are universal. Authors like Natalie Haynes do a great job of redressing the imbalance of perspective in putting the female characters centre stage. But the modern versions have to stand as a work of fiction in their own right.

Recently, I noticed that Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Olive Kitteridge’ has been rebranded as ‘a novel in stories’. I wonder if ‘A Thousand Ships’ could similarly be described: ‘an epic in stories’ perhaps? Perhaps I should reread it with this descriptor in mind.

I really struggled with this book to begin with because of the way it’s written - short chapters where I was just beginning to understand what was happening then it would be another story. I did nearly give up a few times but I kept going and once I got to 60% of the way through it became much easier to read. The chapters seemed longer and revealed more of the story.
Its very cleverly written and definitely worth persevering!

It’s interesting that the blurb mentions Madeline Miller and Pat Barker. I’ve read The Song of Achilles and Circe (both by Miller) and The Silence of the Girls by Barker. I enjoyed A Thousand Ships more than the Barker but didn’t love it as much as either of Miller’s books.

Barker’s The Silence of the Girls disappointed me because I’d hoped it would retell events from The Iliad from the perspective of the female characters. But halfway through the narrative we switch from the female characters’ viewpoints to Achilles’, and I didn’t think we needed yet another male view on events. Thankfully, Haynes doesn’t do this in A Thousand Ships. Instead, we get an entirely female perspective as we skip between the stories of various characters featured in The Iliad (and, to a lesser extent, The Odyssey), including goddesses.

In this way Haynes’ book applies a great deal of imagination to “recover” the voices of characters who only get brief mentions in the classics. By doing so she is following a tradition going all the way back to Ovid and his Heroides, a series of poems in the form of letters written from the point of view of heroines of Greek and Roman mythology.

I liked that so many different stories were included and the way they were interlinked. The structure is almost a series of short stories skillfully woven together, but then that all seems approriate given how important Penelope’s story and her weaving is.

My favourite voices included Calliope. I thought it was original to give the Muse herself a voice and that she was quite rightly cheesed off at being ordered about by mortal poets.

My other favourite was Penelope. She is often portrayed as the “perfect wife” (mostly by male authors and artists, it has to be said), meaning she is patient, faithful and silent. I always imagined she would actually be incredibly annoyed that Odysseus went off to war for 10 years and then took 10 years to return (entirely his own fault for being a show-off), especially as tales of his escapades and time spent with other women got back to her. Haynes’ Penelope displays quite a bit of this justified irritation and weariness.

The research behind the book is meticulous. In the mining of classical literature, but also in archaeological details, right down to the description of a pair of earrings and the clothing worn by the Amazons.

The classical epics depict heroism as a male act, usually involving fighting and death. But A Thousand Ships puts forward the idea that the women who are left behind and must carry on despite having lost everything are also incredibly brave, even if their everyday heroism and incredible strength hasn’t been seen as worthy of epic poetry.

You don’t have to have previous knowledge of the The Iliad or Greek mythology to read and enjoy A Thousand Ships. However, I’d argue it would increase your enjoyment as, by having prior knowledge of the stories on which Haynes’ is basing her narratives, you’ll find it a more relaxing read.

Overall: a terrific collection of “recovered” female voices which bring to life characters and celebrate a quieter heroism sidelined in epic literature.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

There's been something of a trend for feminist retellings of Greek mythology recently, and Haynes's novel definitely falls into this category. I appreciate what she does here by juxtaposing a multitude of female voices against the traditional male-centred narrative of the Trojan War and its aftermath. I particularly enjoyed the more unfamiliar voices, such as Chryseis and Laodamia. However, telling the stories as snapshots meant we didn't really get to engage with the characters fully. In my opinion, Madeline Miller's Circe is much more effective by exploring one female character and centring her experience as as important as traditional heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus. That being said, Haynes's book is still compelling and important and I'm glad it's receiving accolades such as being shortlisted for the Women's Prize.

This was a good book set around the Trojian war. I'm not a fan of historical books but I found myself enjoying this one and getting sucked into the story. A good book with a great premise.

This is a fantastic book, centred on the story of the Trojan War and told from the perspective of the women that were involved. I have read a couple of other books on the same theme previously but this was without doubt the best. Before reading this one I believed that I had a pretty good knowledge of the stories but I was surprised at how little I knew about many of the characters, and it is some of the lesser known women that have the most interesting, touching stories.

A wonderful read that is heartbreaking at times but also has some light humour. The women are all amazing in their own way, particularly the feisty ones ;)

I absolutely loved this book. I was familiar with the story of Troy in its broad terms and I’m so disappointed in myself for never noticing that it just glosses over the women completely.

This book is a clever, funny and engaging retelling of the familiar story and I was completely engrossed. It’s very clever and I really hope it wins the Women’s Prize this year. I can’t think of anyone I wouldn’t recommend it to.

I’m so grateful for the advance copy. Thank you!