"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." — Madeline Miller, New York Times bestselling author of The Song of Achilles and Circe.

“Reinterprets two of Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone. . . . the alternating structure proves powerful.” — The New Yorker

"This Gordian knot of incest still has the power to shock, and Haynes is deft with it and with its consequences for the next generation. Her grasp of the ancient city-state is marvelously firm. Her sturdy sentences conjure the punishing Greek summer heat that quells movement and the gold rings bunching the fat on the fingers of florid men." — Kirkus Reviews

“The legends of Oedipus and his daughter Antigone are told through two interwoven story lines in Haynes’s dark, elegant novel . . . . Haynes’s greatest achievement is imagining a full world surrounding Sophocles’s tragedies, thrusting two minor characters in their respective plays to the forefront and bringing the myths vividly to life.  — Publishers Weekly

“This is a novel firmly grounded in the physical world, as its language—sensuous, graphic, and violent—shouts aloud to the reader. The world-building, too, is marvelous—no one who has passed through the gates of Thebes as described here is likely ever to forget the experience. Highly recommended.” — Historical Novel Society

"Wonderful." — Times (UK)

"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." — Guardian