Byrne Fone

War Stories: The Trojan Trilogy Set in the last days of the war at Troy shortly before the great city fell to the attacking Greeks, "War Stories" re-imagines this violent clash of cultures through the eyes of the Greek Prince Antilochus, who comes to Troy to find glory and love and his father, wise King Nestor, who sees the terrible folly of the Greek invasion. The story is also told by characters who, in Homer's "Iliad," are seen but rarely heard: the Trojans themselves. Among these are Chryses, the priest of Apollo, whose curse nearly destroys the Greek army as he tries to save his daughter Chryseis. Chryseis herself, whose story frames the entire novel. Briseis, captured by the Greeks and held for ransom as a slave and sexual plaything. And the women of Troy who were the most tragic victims of the war: Queen Hecabe who sees her royal husband slain before her eyes; Andromache, who loses her parents, her husband, and her child to the carnage; and the mad Cassandra whose prophecies no one believes until it is too late. Finally there is Helen, whose beauty began the war that finally destroyed Troy, the richest and greatest city in the world. Written in the tradition of Mary Renault's "Bull from the Sea," Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian," and Vidal's "Julian," "War Stories" is a memorable, moving, and romantic modern retelling of the greatest epic of the western world.AUTHOR'S NOTE Of the three books in WAR STORIS: THE TROJAN TRILOGY, WAR STORIES is panoramic, with many characters and in its entirety tells a longer story and includes within its covers three books: WAR STORIES, and the other two books in the series: ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY, a gay re-imagining of the Trojan war (and the first modern novel to do so) and TROJAN WOMEN, the story of Chryses, Helen, Cassandra, and the other Trojan women whose lives are so tragically affected by a war fought by men. For those unwilling to tackle the length of WAR STORIES and who want a more focussed and personal narrative of the Trojan War, I have excerpted from it the other two books as separate publications, though they are much changed from their narrative role in WAR STORIES.Eagle-eyed textual comparatists who have had the patience to read all three books might find language in one book that recalls another. This is by design, for it seemed to me to be an interesting experiment to retell the same story, each from a different viewpoint, but connected by echoes of one another. And indeed, all three books tell the same story, the one that Homer gave me. Yet all have been so often re-written, revised, and changed,that ACHILLES: A LOVE STORY and TROJAN WOMEN have ended up being quite different as individual books than what they were when they began as part of another.

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