House of Names was published by Viking in 2017. Toibin retells the House of Atreus myth — Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia, Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, and Orestes’s revenge — in spare, modern prose that strips away the mythological apparatus to expose the raw human emotions beneath.
Clytemnestra narrates the first section in first person: her rage at Agamemnon for luring their daughter to Aulis with a false promise of marriage and slaughtering her on an altar for favorable winds. Her voice is cold, precise, murderous. She plans. She waits ten years. She kills him in his bath.
Orestes’s sections are narrated in third person — he is a boy abducted and imprisoned, gradually building the will to return and kill his mother. His sister Electra plots in the palace, sustained by hatred alone. Toibin empties the story of divine intervention: there are no gods, no Furies, no Apollo commanding revenge. There are only human beings destroying each other because they believe justice requires it.
Collecting House of Names
First edition (Viking, London, 2017): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $15–$25
- Signed first: $30–$50