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Scribner
May 2017
On Sale: May 9, 2017
Featuring: Clytemnestra; King Agamemnon; Electra
288 pages
ISBN: 1501140213
EAN: 9781501140211
Kindle: B01HMXRXSO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Ancient Classics
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning
Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of
Clytemnestra—spectacularly audacious, violent, vengeful,
lustful, and instantly compelling—and her children. “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” So begins
Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the
legendary Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon
left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra
rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover Aegisthus, and
together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day
of his return after nine years at war. Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost
faith in, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to
these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest
daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles,
only to sacrifice her because that is what he was told would
make the winds blow in his favor and take him to Troy; how
she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus,
who shared her bed in the dark and could kill; how Agamemnon
came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally
achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest
for victory, greater than his love for his child. In House of Names, Colm Tóibín brings a modern sensibility
and language to an ancient classic, and gives this
extraordinary character new life, so that we not only
believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge, but applaud it.
He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth’s most
powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she
feels. Told in fours parts, this is a fiercely dramatic
portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her
own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’ story, too: his capture by
the forces of his mother’s lover Aegisthus, his escape and
his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches
over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow
calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has
the fates of both of them in her hands.
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