Finishing Circe leaves an oddly specific ache, and I think a lot of readers misdiagnose it. They assume they want more Greek myth retellings, so they buy the nearest book with a gold-foil goddess on the cover and come away disappointed. What they actually wanted was that particular voice: an immortal woman narrating centuries of her own life, slightly wry, extremely lonely, gradually becoming dangerous.
That is a much harder thing to find than mythology, which is everywhere at the moment. The film has poured petrol on an already burning market, with Madeline Miller’s backlist up 128 per cent for Circe and 82 per cent for The Song of Achilles in a single August week, according to Publishers Weekly. Publishers have responded with volume. Quality has not kept pace.
So rather than a ranked list, here is an attempt to work out what you are missing, and which Greek myth retellings will actually replace it.
Greek Myth Retellings That Match the Loneliness
This is the real Circe feeling, and only a few books have it.
Ithaca by Claire North comes closest. It is narrated by Hera, it stays on the island rather than following the adventure, and it treats Penelope’s twenty-year holding action as the political thriller it obviously is. North writes divine boredom and divine spite better than almost anyone working.
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin is the quiet masterpiece of this whole category and hardly anyone mentions it. Le Guin takes a woman who has no lines at all in Virgil’s Aeneid and gives her a full life, a landscape and an unsettling awareness of her own fictionality. It is the best-written book on this page by a comfortable margin.
Hera by Jennifer Saint carries the same weight of immortal time, following the queen of the gods across the sweep of the myths as her power is repeatedly constrained by a husband nobody can check.
If You Miss the Anger
Plenty of readers came out of Circe less moved than radicalised, and there is a whole wing of Greek myth retellings for you.
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes retells the Trojan War entirely through its women and refuses to organise them into a single plot. Haynes is a classicist and a comedian, which turns out to be the ideal combination. Her Penelope writes letters to her absent husband that get funnier and colder by the year.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker is the hardest book here. Briseis narrates the Iliad from inside the Greek camp, and Barker will not let a single line of it be beautiful. Read it when you have the stomach.
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is two hundred pages, twenty years old, and still the sharpest thing anyone has written about the twelve enslaved women hanged at the end of the poem.
I, Medusa by Ayana Gray takes the most reflexively villainised woman in the canon and does the obvious, overdue thing with her.
If You Miss Achilles and Patroclus
Be honest with yourself: you may not want Greek myth retellings at all. You may want that ending again.
This Immortal Heart by Jennifer Saint is the most direct match in tone, and the easiest way into Saint’s growing shelf.
The Things Gods Break by Abigail Owen sits firmly on the romantasy side of the border and knows it.
Bonds of Hercules by Jasmine Mas is a great deal spicier than Miller and makes no apology for it. Check the content notes before you gift it to your mother.
Wearing the Lion by John Wiswell is the surprise of the recent crop: a Heracles novel that is genuinely tender about the worst story in the canon.
Greek Myth Retellings That Leave Greece Entirely
The pattern Miller popularised works on any mythology, and some of the best recent books apply it elsewhere.
The Witch’s Heart by Genevieve Gornichec follows Angrboda, Loki’s first wife, through Norse myth. Structurally it is the closest sibling Circe has, right down to the isolation and the slow accumulation of power.
Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel does it to the Ramayana, rehabilitating a queen the tradition treats as a villain.
Cleopatra by Saara El-Arifi moves to Egypt and applies the same instinct to a queen the historical record keeps flattening into a seductress.
Honest Warnings About Greek Myth Retellings
Not everything with a laurel wreath on the jacket is doing what Miller did. Two things to watch for.
The first is the cover trap. A gold silhouette on a dark background now signals a marketing category rather than a style, and it covers everything from serious literary fiction to fairly ordinary paranormal romance. Read the first page before you commit.
The second is the sequel-by-another-name problem. A number of recent books simply narrate a familiar story from a new angle without having anything to say about it, and the difference between that and Circe is the difference between a summary and an argument. Miller works because she disagrees with Homer. The weaker imitators merely rephrase him.
If you want to see what the novelists are pushing against, incidentally, the originals are free. The Perseus Digital Library has Homer and the tragedians in Greek with English alongside, and half an hour there will show you exactly how much a novelist has invented.
Where I Would Start
If you want one book and no deliberation: Ithaca. It has the voice, the loneliness and the politics, and it sends you straight back to the source with new suspicions.
If you have not yet read the poem itself, that is the better use of the next fortnight, and our guides to what to read before the film and which translation to choose will get you there without the usual intimidation.
These stories have lasted three thousand years by being handed around, altered and argued with. The best Greek myth retellings are not a departure from that tradition. They are the tradition, working exactly as designed.