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The New York Times bestselling author of Pandora's Jar and Stone Blind returns with a powerful retelling of Oedipus and Antigone from the perspectives of the women the myths overlooked.
When you have grown up as I have, there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can't be faced ... Because that is what happened the last time, and that is why my siblings and I have grown up in a cursed house, children of cursed parents ...
Jocasta is just fifteen when she is told that she must marry the King of Thebes, an old man she has never met. Her life has never been her own, and nor will it be, unless she outlives her strange, absent husband.
Ismene is the same age when she is attacked in the palace she calls home. Since the day of her parents' tragic deaths a decade earlier, she has always longed to feel safe with the family she still has. But with a single act of violence, all that is about to change.
With the turn of these two events, a tragedy is set in motion. But not as we've known it.
"This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men." —Kirkus Reviews
"The legends of Oedipus and his daughter Antigone are told through two interwoven story lines in Haynes's dark, elegant novel ... . Haynes's greatest achievement is imagining a full world surrounding Sophocles's tragedies, thrusting two minor characters in their respective plays to the forefront and bringing the myths vividly to life." —Publishers Weekly
"Haynes's fascination with this long vanished world is evident in every line ... Her Thebes... is vividly captured: a place of hard light and sharp shadows, dust, fountains and dry heat." —Guardian (UK)
"Reinterprets two of Sophocles' Theban plays, Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone... . the alternating structure proves powerful." —The New Yorker
"A passionate and gripping account of a famously dysfunctional family. Haynes balances a fresh take on the material with a deep love for her sources, wearing her scholarship with grace, and giving new voice to the often-overlooked but fascinating Jocasta and Ismene." —Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles and Circe.
This information about The Children of Jocasta was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: James Betts
Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster and – according to the Washington Post – a rock star mythologist. Her first novel, The Amber Fury, was published to great acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, as was The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, her previous book. Her second novel, The Children of Jocasta, was published in 2017. Her retelling of the Trojan War, A Thousand Ships, was published in 2019. It was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2020. It has been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent non-fiction book, Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myth was published in Oct 2020, and reached number 2 in the New York Times Bestseller chart. Her novel about Medusa, Stone Blind, was published in Sep 2022 and Margaret Atwood liked it. So did Neil Gaiman. ...
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