Children of Jocasta

A powerful retelling of Oedipus and Antigone from the perspectives of the women the myths overlooked, from Natalie Haynes, the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of A Thousand Ships and the Sunday Times bestseller Stone Blind.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 you know it.'Haynes balances a fresh take on the material . . . giving new voice to the often-overlooked but fascinating Jocasta and Ismene.' - Madeline Miller, author of Circe.

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., 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., Natalie Haynes takes on Sophocles in her vivid and affecting second novel, Glorious, gripping and brutal . . . I loved it, New life is breathed into a powerful ancient story through Natalie Haynes's clever and vivid story telling.

Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and Stone Blind, which was a Sunday Times bestseller. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora's Jar, was a New York Times bestseller in 2022. She was written and performed eight series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. In 2015, she was awarded the Classical Association Prize for her work in bringing Classics to a wider audience. The Children of Jocasta is her second novel.