Scribner
May 2017
On Sale: May 9, 2017
Featuring: Clytemnestra; King Agamemnon; Electra
288 pages ISBN: 1501140213 EAN: 9781501140211 Kindle: B01HMXRXSO Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm TΓ³ibΓn comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestraβspectacularly audacious, violent, vengeful, lustful, and instantly compellingβand her children.
βI have been acquainted with the smell of death.β So begins Clytemnestraβs 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 betrayalβhis quest for victory, greater than his love for his child.
In House of Names, Colm TΓ³ibΓn brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestraβs thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek mythβs 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 Orestesβ story, too: his capture by the forces of his motherβs 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.
© 2003-2026