Pat Barker

Rivers looked round the room, which seemed cold and bleak in spite of the small fire. ‘Do you hear from Owen at all?’

‘Constantly. He… er… writes distinctly effusive letters. You know…’ He hesitated. ‘I knew about the hero-worship, but I’m beginning to think it was rather more than that.’

Rivers watched the firelight flicker on Sassoon’s hair and face. He said, ‘It happens.’

‘I just hope I was kind enough.’

‘I’m sure you were.’

For once, women with sons envied those with daughters, because girls would be allowed to live. Boys, if anywhere near fighting age, were routinely slaughtered. Even pregnant women were sometimes killed, speared through the belly on the off chance their child would be a boy. I noticed Ismene, who was four months pregnant with my husband’s child, pressing her hands hard into her stomach, trying to convince herself the pregnancy didn’t show.

His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner.

but then in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women.

the sound seemed merely to intensify the silence.

I had no reason to love her, but what made me angry at that moment was that in allowing herself to dwindle until she was nothing more than a heap of creased flesh and jutting bone, she’d left me with so very little to hate.

His mother was sitting only a few feet away, struggling with a fretful baby who wanted to suckle but was fighting the breast.

My youngest brother—fourteen years old, barely able to lift my father’s sword—I saw him die. I saw the flash of the upraised spear, I saw my brother lying on the ground wriggling like a stuck pig.

died with both hands gripping Achilles’s spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the butcher.”