House of Names

Winner of the 2018 Audie Award for Literary Fiction & Classics

From the thrilling imagination of best-selling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra – spectacularly audacious, violent, vengeful, lustful, and instantly compelling – and her children.

“I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” So begins Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary Greek city from which her husband, King Agamemnon, left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover, Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war.

Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost faith in, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody actions: how her husband deceived her eldest daughter, Iphigeneia, with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her because that is what he was told would make the winds blow in his favor and take him to Troy; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus, who shared her bed in the dark and could kill; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal – his quest for victory greater than his love for his child.

In House of Names, Colm Tóibín brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic and gives this extraordinary character new life so that we not only believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge but applaud it. He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth’s most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Told in four parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes’ story, too: his capture by the forces of his mother’s lover, Aegisthus, his escape, and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow calculation until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates of both of them in her hands.