Review of "The Silence of the Girls" by Pat Barker

Ages since I've read any Pat Barker, and I'd forgotten how great she is. This is a re-telling of the Iliad story, focusing on the bits about Achilles that are the core of the actual Iliad (rather than what we think is in there because of all the other re-tellings), but told from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan slave-woman prize that is the cause of Achilles's estrangement from the Greek army. 

It's really good. There's a little bit of supernatural stuff to bring it into line with the Iliad  - Achilles meeting his sea-nymph mother, mainly - but it's mainly realistic and gritty, with lots of ghastly depictions of Bronze Age warfare, and no punches pulled about the barbarity of the Greeks when they finally take and sack Troy.