Stone Blind
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023
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Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023.
In Stone Blind, the instant Sunday Times bestseller, Natalie Haynes brings the infamous Medusa to life as you have never seen her before.
'Witty, gripping, ruthless' – Margaret Atwood via Twitter
'Beautiful and moving' – Neil Gaiman
‘So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters’
Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.
When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever – writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.
Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .
‘A fierce feminist exploration of female rage, written with wit and empathy’ – Glamour
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Haynes (A Thousand Ships) reframes the story of Medusa from Greek mythology as one of victim-shaming in this sharp retelling. Haynes recasts Medusa, the only mortal from a family of gods, not as a monster but as survivor of rape by Poseidon, whose wife, Athena, then punishes her for it. As Medusa deals with her new life with a head of snakes and a gaze that turns people to stone, Haynes interjects by addressing the reader with a question: "I'm wondering if you still think of her as a monster.... I suppose it depends on what you think that word means." Haynes's inventive reappraisal extends to her narrative devices, including rueful passages from the perspective of Medusa's severed head ("I have a much lower opinion of mortal men than did, for reasons which I would assume were obvious"), and she invites the reader into Medusa's point of view with rich sensory details: "She could hear the cormorants arguing with the gulls and she knew exactly which rocks they had perched on before picking their quarrel." Even before the plot builds toward Perseus's pursuit of Medusa, Hayes conveys an urgency to Medusa's life as a mortal woman among vengeful gods. Fans of feminist retellings will love this.
