Clytemnestra

Product Information

It has sold into 18 territories worldwide, is a Saturday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the HWA Debut Crown Award. Both Jennifer Saint’s Elektra and Claire Heywood’s The Daughters of Sparta, where Clytemnestra takes up a large role, ultimately cover a far larger chunk of story, and while excellent books in their own right, end up less character-driven.

Clytemnestra is immediately established as a compelling heroine, as despite her perspective on events being way off center from the usual narrative of the Iliad. That she uses this position in the King’s court and pretends to be Clytemnestra’s friend and confidante gives her motives for initially aiding the unwilling queen in attempting to rid herself of the child she doesn’t want but was forced on her. Something else I found interesting was the portrayal of Clytemnestra’s first marriage to Tantalus, King of Maeonia, shown here to be a marriage made for love, in contrast to her later forced marriage to Agamemnon.Come down the travelators, exit Sainsbury's, turn right and follow the pedestrianised walkway to Crown Walk and turn right - and Coles will be right in front of you. So many depictions of strong, powerful women, especially modern ones, present a career-driven, ambitious woman that has little to no interest in or love for children. Clytemnestra by Constanza Casati takes one of the most reviled women in Greek mythology and gives her back control over her narrative. Like other Spartan women, Clytemnestra and her sisters are taught to fight, run and wrestle as children and grow up enjoying more independence and freedom than women elsewhere in Ancient Greece.

Costanza Castaic was born in Texas in 1995 and attended a classical Liceo in Italy, where she studied Ancient Greek, and Ancient Greek literature, under one of the country's most rigorous academic program. It is the first in The House of Atreus trilogy and will be published by Neem Tree Press in June 2023.Highly recommend for fans of mythological retellings and authors Madeline Miller, Jennifer Saint, and Natalie Haynes. The pace does falter slightly in the middle of the narrative while chronicling the years Clytemnestra waits for the Battle of Troy to end while she rules over Mycenae with a firm hand, but not so much that you lose interest in the story.

Queen Clytemnestra’s world shatters when Agamemnon, a rival to the throne of Mycenae, storms her palace, destroys her family and claims not only the throne but Clytemnestra herself. From the very start, there was something about her that felt as though she shouldn’t be trusted and for her to be shown as the mother of Agamemnon’s firstborn son. Buki Papillon, author of AN ORDINARY WONDER Bold and elegant, this novel deconstructs Clytemnestra's infamy and then, with tremendous empathy and wisdom, reconstructs her into an enthrallingly complex figure filled with passion and spirit. I paired my reading with the excellent audio narration by Olivia Vinall which truly enhanced my experience.

Readers who are enjoying the current plethora of mythological retellings won't want to miss this absorbing examination of a complicated queen.

The narrative follows Clytemnestra from her early life as a Princess of Sparta, her relationship with her siblings, her subsequent marriage to her first husband and the tragic events that lead to her marriage to Agamemnon and her life as his wife and mother to his children and the events that follow.This book highlights them all, making it a read you aren’t able to put down, non-stop action on every page. I don’t think I’ll ever really like the present tense, but there are so many books written that way it’s impossible to avoid! As she challenges the views and rules of the era, she refuses to be an inert object of fate or the gods, confronting prejudices and labels forced on her by a patriarchal society. Yet the novel never becomes too complicated in its descriptions of the past; the prose is lyrical in its simplicity. As Clytemnestra quips about Theseus, “Heroes like him are made of greed and cruelty: they take and take until the world around them is stripped of its beauty.