a thousand ships a novel by natalie haynes

Hecabe travels to Thrace with Greek warrior Odysseus as his war prize. Captured in a raid after watching Achilles slaughter her family, Briseis is claimed by Achilles but refuses to allow the Greeks to see her grieve. Agamemnon relents, and Chryseis is sent back to her father. Shortly thereafter, plague decimates the Greek camp.

A young Trojan who is caught when she ventures outside the city walls, Chryseis, becomes a source of strife in the Greek camp after Agamemnon, the leader of the expedition, refuses to return her to her father, a priest of Apollo. As the novel unfolds, it returns to their perspectives, sometimes as a collective, and the narratives of Greek women whose lives have been irrevocably altered because of the war.Ĭollectively, the Trojan women discuss the events before, during, and after the fall of Troy: Paris bringing Helen (wife of Spartan king Menelaus) to Troy, Amazon warrior Penthesilea entering the battle for the Trojans and dying at the hands of Achilles (the Greeks’ best warrior), Achilles’s brutal slaughter of Hector and impious desecration of his corpse, and the women’s capture. This is followed by a narrative set in the Greek camp, where a group of captive Trojan women await to be distributed among the warriors as war prizes.

Her chapter concludes with her dying as she attempts to escape. The next vignette brings readers into the heart of war’s destruction, the fallen city of Troy in flames, through the point of view of Creusa, wife of Trojan war hero Aeneas, who has fled the city with their son. She decides the bard will have to give up something he values if he wishes to receive an epic from her. The novel begins with an old bard calling on the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, but she has grown weary of the same stories being told. This study guide refers to the 2019 hardcover edition published by Mantle Press. Weaving back and forth through time, Haynes stitches together vignettes about women told in an array of ancient sources spanning hundreds of years, from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey of classical Greece to Augustan Roman poets Virgil and Ovid.

A thousand ships a novel by natalie haynes