For the Most Beautiful

For the Most Beautiful retells the Trojan War through Briseis and Krisayis, two young women caught between Greek armies, royal households and the whims of the gods. As Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel and Troy moves toward destruction, the women experience war as captivity, loss and a struggle to retain agency. Hauser combines the familiar events of the Iliad with a female-centred perspective that gives the conflict’s human cost equal weight with heroic fame.

The women’s viewpoint changes the moral scale of familiar epic events. Heroic quarrels that create fame for warriors produce captivity, bereavement and sexual vulnerability for those taken as prizes. By placing divine intervention beside the practical experience of enslaved women, the novel asks what the language of honour looks like to people who have almost no control over the war conducted around them.