Helen of Troy - Margaret George

Helen of Troy is one of history's great mythological characters. Now Margaret George, the highly acclaimed, bestselling historical novelist, has turned her intelligent, perceptive eye to this all too human story of passion, regret and vengeance.

Through her own voice, we experience young Helen's discovery of her divine origin and terrifying beauty. Shielded from the eyes of strangers, and denied sight of her own reflection, she remains protected from her unique beauty until she is of marriageable age. While hardly more than a girl, kings and princes compete for her hand in marriage. When the remote Spartan king Menelaus prevails, Helen settles into a life of apparent contentment and domestic harmony and bears him a daughter. At the age of twenty, when she catches a glimpse of Paris, a handsome visiting Trojan prince, she becomes painfully aware of the passion lacking in her own marriage bed and within days the two are lovers and elope to Troy at the dead of night, the night the Trojan War can be said to have properly begun. For to all her former suitors, pledged to support her husband, to her warmongering brother-in-law, the ruthless Agamemnon, and to the cuckolded Menelaus, nothing short of capturing Helen and bringing her back to Sparta will now do.

With a cast of irresistable, legendary characters - Odysseus, Hector, Achillles, Priam, Clytemnestra, Agamemnon, as well as Helen and Paris themselves - and a wealth of material that reproduces the Bronze Age in all its glory, George brigns to life a war that we have only read about. Laden with doom, yet surprising in its moments of innocence and beauty, Helen of Troy is a beautifully told story of a legendary woman and her times.