This is the last book in Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy, in which The Iliad is reimagined from the perspective of the women Homer consigned to the margins. It opens with the maid Ritsa and her mistress Cassandra boarding the Medusa, a “battered old sick bucket” bound for the Greek kingdom of Mycenae. Cassandra is the kidnapped Trojan seer and concubine of Agamemnon, the warrior king who is returning home after a decade of war. Having razed Troy, Agamemnon will be expecting a hero’s welcome, though there is uncertainty over how he will be received by his wife, Clytemnestra. Ten years have passed since he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for safe passage to Troy. Will Clytemnestra have forgiven her husband or will she seek revenge?

The voice actor Kristin Atherton is the book’s assured and imaginative narrator, portraying Ritsa as a northerner who is loyal if fitfully exasperated by her mistress, and Agamemnon as gruff and short-tempered. She brings just the right amount of complexity to Cassandra, capturing both her youth and the fear and wisdom gleaned from her visions.

As the Medusa approaches the harbour in Mycenae, its passengers are greeted by a new temple-like building on the headland, “its columns gleaming bone-white against the grey sky”. It is Iphigenia’s tomb, built by Clytemnestra and positioned so that it is the first thing her husband sees on his homecoming. As the colour drains from Agamemnon’s face, Cassandra takes in the scene and murmurs to Ritsa: “She’s clever.”

Available via Penguin Audio 9hr 36min

Further listening

We Solve Murders
Richard Osman, Penguin Audio, 10hr 33min
Nicola Walker reads Osman’s thriller in which Amy, a young security guard, pairs up with her ex-policeman father-in-law to investigate a murder.

Yellowface
RF Kuang, Borough, 8hr 38min
A struggling white writer steals the unpublished manuscript of a successful Asian American novelist who has died in a freak accident. Read by Helen Laser.