The Silence of the Girls: A Novel

If any man love the instruments of any craft, the gods have called him.

But he’s beginning to understand that grief doesn’t strike bargains. There’s no way of avoiding the agony—or even of getting through it faster. It’s got him in its claws and it won’t let go till he’s learnt every lesson it has to teach.

What are they afraid of? That one day they’ll have to endure pain like this? Or that they never will, that they’re incapable of it, because grief’s only ever as deep as the love it’s replaced.

sleek-haired, brown-skinned, quick and deft in all her movements; she reminded me of a wren.

perhaps the agony of losing Patroclus has swallowed every lesser grief.

She was the youngest of Hecuba’s large family, always running to keep up with her sisters, wailing the great cry of youngest children everywhere, “Wait for me! Wait for me!”

They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams—and in their worst nightmares too.

It seemed in those few moments as if time had been suspended, that the wave curling over us might never break. Pure delusion, of course. The future was hurtling towards us, Achilles’s life measured now in days not weeks.

Achilles lives in the present. He remembers the past, not without regret, but increasingly without resentment.