The Children of Jocasta

Praise for The Children of Jocasta [A] 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 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 After two and a half millennia of near silence, Jocasta and Ismene are finally given a chance to speak. Oedipus, Jocasta, and their children are depicted as ordinary men and women grappling with unequivocally sublunary issues. Haynes's Thebes is vividly captured. In her excellent new novel, she harnesses the mutability of myth. --The Guardian The ancient city state comes vividly alive in Haynes's hands. --The Spectator A mesmerising work of beauty and brutality. --The Australian In its physical details, her story is a plausible reconstruction of urban life in a Greek palace-state--complete with obsidian mirrors and wax writingtablets, dark rooms and sacrificial fires. --New Statesman Finally in this novel, after so many thousands of years, Jocasta is given her voice. --Sydney Review of Books This is a novel firmly grounded in the physical world, as its language--sensuous, graphic, and violent--shouts aloud to the reader. The world-building, too, is marvelous--no one who has passed through the gates of Thebes as described here is likely ever to forget the experience. Highly recommended. --Historical Novel Society