About This Book
Long before she became Greek mythology's most infamous queen, Clytemnestra was a daughter, a wife, a mother — and a woman whose life was shaped by losses she never chose and crimes committed against her. Costanza Casati's debut novel reclaims her story from the margins of the Trojan War saga, placing her at the center of her own fate. What unfolds is not a villain's origin story but something more unsettling: a portrait of a woman who watches the world strip everything from her, one unbearable act at a time, and decides she will not go quietly into erasure.
Casati writes with a restraint that makes the novel's emotional violence hit harder. The prose is spare and deliberate, never melodramatic, which only deepens the dread as events build toward their inevitable conclusion. The second-person framing in key passages creates an intimacy that feels almost accusatory — daring the reader to judge a woman whose choices were always made in the shadow of men who faced no such scrutiny. This is mythological fiction that trusts its readers to sit with moral ambiguity rather than resolve it neatly.