Most of us met Circe the way Homer introduces her: a sorceress on an island who turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs, a hazard to be navigated before the hero moves on to better things.
Then Madeline Miller published Circe in 2018, and the sorceress stopped being a hazard and became a person. The daughter of the sun god Helios and the nymph Perse, born powerless in a family of gods who treat her as an embarrassment, she discovers witchcraft almost by accident, uses it in a moment of jealousy, and is exiled to the island of Aiaia for it. What follows is centuries of solitude, craft, and slow self-knowledge, with Daedalus, the Minotaur, Medea, and eventually Odysseus passing through her life as visitors rather than protagonists.
If you finished it and sat there for a while with the book closed, you already know what the hunger is. You want another old story told from the margin. Another woman, or another outsider, who was only ever a plot device and turns out to have an inner life as large as any hero’s. Here are ten books that do that, and what each one shares with Circe.
It helps to name the pieces before the list, because “mythology retelling” is a wide shelf and Circe sits on one particular corner of it.
First, the marginal narrator. Miller doesn’t retell the Odyssey; she retells the part of it that happens on someone else’s island. Second, the long time scale. Gods and witches don’t age, so the book can let a feeling mature over generations. Third, craft as character. Circe’s herbs, her loom, her slow mastery of pharmaka are the way she becomes herself, and that patient, tactile work is half the pleasure. Fourth, the prose: unhurried, precise, and quietly furious in places. And finally, the quiet revisionism. Nobody in the book lectures you about what the myths got wrong. The correction is built into whose eyes you see through.
The ten books below hit some or all of these. I’ve noted which.
If you haven’t read Miller’s 2011 debut, start here. It retells the Iliad through Patroclus, the exiled prince who becomes Achilles’s closest companion and, in Miller’s version, his lover. Where Circe is about solitude, this is about intimacy, and it is among the most devastating reading experiences BookTok has ever collectively warned each other about. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012.
The Circe connection: The same author, the same patient lyricism, and the same decision to look at a famous war from the side of someone the epic barely names. Keep tissues nearby.
Barker’s 2018 novel takes the Trojan War and gives it to Briseis, the queen of a conquered city who is handed to Achilles as a prize of war. It is a harder, angrier book than Circe, written in plain, blunt sentences, and it asks what the Iliad’s glory looks like from inside the camp, among the women whose cities are burned and whose names the poem mostly forgets.
The Circe connection: A woman narrating her own survival inside a story that was never about her, and a quiet insistence that the people at the edges were thinking all along.
Saint’s 2021 debut follows Ariadne, the Cretan princess who helps Theseus escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth and is rewarded by being abandoned on an island. The novel also follows her sister Phaedra, whose story takes a darker turn. It’s a book about being used by heroes, and about what a woman does with the years after the myth ends, and it reads like Miller for readers who want a faster pace and more overt emotion.
The Circe connection: Minotaur and Daedalus both appear in Circe too, so you’ll recognize the Cretan court from a different angle. The tone is similarly lyrical, and the sense of being trapped inside a divine family is shared.
Haynes, a classicist and broadcaster, published this in 2019 and structured it as many women’s voices: Hecuba, Cassandra, Penelope, Helen, Briseis, and others, linked by the Trojan War and its long aftermath. It is wry and sharp where Circe is solemn, and it works as a kind of tour of the women whose perspectives the Iliad and Odyssey skipped.
The Circe connection: The same project of restoring the women of Homer to the center of their own stories, delivered with more humor and a lighter hand.
In 2008, Le Guin took a woman who barely speaks in Virgil’s Aeneid, Lavinia, the Latin princess Aeneas marries, and wrote a novel in which she knows she is a character in a poem. It is spare, thoughtful, and tender, and a good pick if what you loved about Circe was the contemplative mood rather than the magic.
The Circe connection: A silenced woman becomes the narrator, and the book is as interested in what a life feels like day to day as in the epic events around it.
Atwood’s 2005 novella gives the Odyssey to Penelope, who narrates from the underworld with a dry, bitter wit about twenty years of waiting, suitors, and the twelve maids hanged on Telemachus’s orders after Odysseus returns. A chorus of those maids interrupts the story with their own songs and accusations.
The Circe connection: Penelope and Odysseus are both major figures in the last third of Circe, so reading Atwood is like hearing the other half of a conversation. It’s also very short, which makes it an easy next read.
Published in 2022, Stone Blind retells the story of Medusa, who in most versions is a monster for someone else to slay. Haynes makes her a woman whose punishment follows an act of violence committed against her, and lets her narrate her own long life, with the Olympians chipping in.
The Circe connection: Another woman turned into a threat by powerful men and gods, and the same sense of an old story being quietly rewritten from the inside. It is angrier and more direct, though.
Patel’s 2022 debut reimagines a figure from the Ramayana, Queen Kaikeyi, whose demand for her son Bharata’s throne and Rama’s exile makes her the villain of the Hindu epic. In this version she is a clever, self-willed woman who learns to bend the world through a kind of magic, and the book follows how a person with good intentions ends up doing the thing history condemns her for.
The Circe connection: The same project of rehabilitating a woman the tradition punished, and the same slow growth of a reluctant, powerful woman into someone who owns her choices.
Gornichec’s 2021 novel centers on Angrboda, a giantess and witch burned three times by Odin and left to raise the children she has with Loki, among them the wolf Fenrir and the serpent Jormungandr. If you loved Circe living with the knowledge that gods can hurt her but cannot control her, this is the Norse equivalent.
The Circe connection: A witch in exile, motherhood under divine threat, and a story that treats magic as a kind of labor.
Arden’s 2017 debut, the first of the Winternight Trilogy, is set in medieval Russia and follows Vasilisa, a girl who can see the household spirits that her devout stepmother and a new priest want to banish. It is a slow, atmospheric, snow-laden book, and a good bridge for readers who want the same sense of an old, half-vanished world.
The Circe connection: A young woman whose power makes her suspect to the people around her, and a setting where the old powers are quietly being displaced.
The right book depends on which part of Circe stayed with you.
If it was Miller’s prose, begin with The Song of Achilles. If it was the feminist revision of Homer, go to The Silence of the Girls or A Thousand Ships. If you loved the Cretan chapters, Ariadne is the clearest match. If the solitude and witchcraft hit hardest, try The Witch’s Heart or Kaikeyi. And if you wanted something short and bitingly funny between heavier reads, The Penelopiad will do it in an afternoon.
One practical note: mythology retellings are good candidates for reading in clusters. Several of these books overlap, with the Trojan War and the Odyssey seen from five or six angles, and reading two or three back to back makes the overlap itself the pleasure. Keeping a running list helps you remember who narrated which.
There’s a reason retellings of this kind have become a dependable corner of the market since Circe came out. The myths are a shared inheritance, but they were mostly transmitted by a narrow set of voices. Each new telling from the margin is a small act of correction that still respects the original: it takes the plot as given and changes whose eyes you watch it through.
That is why the best of these feel less like rewrites than like reunions. You already knew the outline. You didn’t know the person.
Track every retelling on your TBR, log which narrator you’ve heard from, and see how the reading list for your next myth binge fills up with Bookdot.
