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Sign up todayHouse of Names
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Learn moreBookseller recommendation
“A mythical retelling of the Oresteia on lost time, lost innocence, lost relationships. Simple, devastating.”
— Ellie • Page 1 Books
Bookseller recommendation
“A masterful manipulation of the classic tragedy of Clytemnestra, queen of Mycenae, Colm Toibin’s House of Names is retelling the story of the House of Atreus and her husband, King Agamemnon. Bursting with rage at the betrayal at the hands of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra orchestrates a murderous plot to avenge the death of daughter Iphigenia, slaughtered in sacrifice to supplicate the gods. Upon his victorious return, an unknowing Agamemnon finds himself ensnared in a trap, facing a kingdom full of deceitful families, ready for vengeance and demanding justice for all the ills suffered since his sojourn to fight the Trojan War. I adored Toibin’s beautifully written adaptation of The Orestia by Aeschylus and his prose is promised to please all lovers of the classics.”
— Kristin • McLean & Eakin Booksellers
* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
* Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, St. Louis Dispatch
From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children—“brilliant…gripping…high drama…made tangible and graphic in Tóibín’s lush prose” (Booklist, starred review).
“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, 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; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus; 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.
House of Names “is a disturbingly contemporary story of a powerful woman caught between the demands of her ambition and the constraints on her gender…Never before has Tóibín demonstrated such range,” (The Washington Post). He 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. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’s 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.
Colm Tóibín is the author of eleven novels, including Long Island, an Oprah’s Book Club Pick; The Magician, winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and Nora Webster; as well as two story collections and several books of criticism. He is the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University and was named the 2022–2024 Laureate for Irish Fiction by the Arts Council of Ireland. He was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Bodley Medal, the Würth Prize for European Literature, and the Prix Femina spécial for his body of work.
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Audiobook details
Author:
Colm Toibin
Narrators:
Juliet Stevenson, Charlie Anson & Pippa Nixon
ISBN:
9781508227922
Length:
8 hours 46 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Simon & Schuster Audio
Publication date:
May 9, 2017
Edition:
Unabridged
Libro.fm rank:
#19,756 Overall
Genre rank:
#468 in Classics