The Greek myths were never meant to stay still. Homer, Aeschylus and Euripides each told the old stories their own way, and modern novelists are doing the same thing: taking the Trojan War, the wanderings of Odysseus and the curse on the House of Atreus, and asking what it all looked like to the people inside it. Above all, they ask what it looked like to the women, who in the old poems are so often given away as prizes, sacrificed or silenced.
This list gathers the best of these novels, grouped by the myth they retell: Troy, the House of Atreus, the Odyssey, Crete and Athens, Thebes and its heroes and monsters, and the journey that carried Troy’s survivors to Italy. Some read like straight historical fiction set in the Bronze Age. Others keep the gods on stage. All of them make the old stories feel lived in.
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What Counts as Greek Mythology Historical Fiction?
For this list, a book has to be a novel that retells a Greek myth with the texture of historical fiction: real places, a believable Bronze Age world, and characters who eat, fight, marry and grieve like people rather than symbols. Some of the authors strip the gods out and read the myths as history, as Mary Renault does. Others keep the gods but treat the human world around them with the same care.
Novels set in historical Greece, from the Persian Wars to Alexander the Great, live on our Best Ancient Greece Historical Fiction list. Six of the best-loved myth retellings appear on both lists, because no list of Greek myth retellings is complete without them.
Quick Picks
| If you want | Read |
|---|---|
| The most famous retelling of all | The Song of Achilles |
| A goddess’s whole life | Circe |
| The Trojan War from the women’s side | The Silence of the Girls |
| A short, perfect literary novel | Ransom |
| The myth read as real history | The King Must Die |
| A wickedly funny Odyssey | The Penelopiad |
| A queen with a grudge | Clytemnestra |
| A gods’ eye view | Ithaca |
The Trojan War
1. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011)
Setting: Phthia, Mount Pelion and the Greek camp at Troy
Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled after a childhood accident and sent to the court of King Peleus. There he meets Achilles, the king’s golden son, half divine and already marked out for glory. Their friendship deepens into love, and when Helen is taken from Sparta, both of them are pulled into the war at Troy.
Miller, a classics teacher by training, tells the story through Patroclus’s eyes, and that choice changes everything. Achilles is no longer a distant hero but a person seen up close, by the one who knows him best. The novel won the Orange Prize in 2012 and opened the door for the wave of retellings on this list. See our Madeline Miller author page for her other books.
Perfect for: Readers who want the Iliad as a love story, and anyone new to myth retellings.
2. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (2018)
Setting: Lyrnessus and the Greek camp outside Troy
Briseis is a queen of Lyrnessus until the Greeks sack her city. Overnight she becomes property, handed to Achilles as a prize of war. In the Iliad she is the girl two men quarrel over. Here she tells her own story, and the camp looks very different from the women’s huts.
Barker made her name with the First World War novels of the Regeneration Trilogy, and she brings the same unflinching eye to Troy. The war is mud, rats, sickness and fear, and the voice is plain and modern, which makes the cruelty land harder. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. Our Pat Barker author page covers the whole trilogy.
Perfect for: Readers who want the Trojan War without the glamour.
3. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (2019)
Setting: Troy, Greece and the seas between, before, during and after the war
Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, is tired of hearing only about the men. So she tells the Trojan War through the women it touched: the Trojan queen Hecabe and her daughters, Penelope waiting on Ithaca, the goddesses whose quarrel started it all, and many more.
Haynes is a classicist and broadcaster, and the novel moves between dozens of voices, some tragic, some furious and some very funny. Penelope’s acid letters to her absent husband are a highlight. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020.
Perfect for: Readers who want the whole war in one book, from every side.
4. Ransom by David Malouf (2009)
Setting: Troy and the Greek camp, near the end of the Iliad
Achilles, mad with grief for Patroclus, drags Hector’s body around the walls of Troy day after day. King Priam decides to do something no king has done: to go to Achilles himself, as an ordinary father, with no royal trappings and only a carter for company, and ask for his son back.
The Australian novelist David Malouf retells the last books of the Iliad in under 250 pages, and every page counts. The battles are almost absent. What remains is grief, dignity and an unlikely friendship along the road. It is the most quietly moving book on this list.
Perfect for: Readers who want literary fiction and a book to read in an afternoon.
5. Cassandra by Christa Wolf (1983)
Setting: Troy, remembered from the gates of Mycenae
Cassandra, the Trojan princess cursed to see the future and never be believed, waits outside the gates of Mycenae as Agamemnon’s captive. In the hours left to her, she looks back over her life in Troy: her family, the war and the slow slide of her city into ruin.
Christa Wolf wrote the novel in East Germany, and it reads as a meditation on power, war and who gets to tell the story. It is denser and more reflective than the newer retellings, and the English edition (1984) adds four essays in which Wolf explains how the novel took shape.
Perfect for: Readers who like their myth retellings serious and thought-provoking.
6. Daughters of Sparta by Claire Heywood (2021)
Setting: Sparta and Mycenae, from childhood to the end of the Trojan War
Helen and her sister Klytemnestra grow up together in Sparta, princesses whose marriages are arranged for them. One goes to Menelaos, the other to Agamemnon, and both learn how little say they have in their own lives.
Heywood studied classics at Warwick, and her novel leaves the gods out entirely, reading the myth as a story of two sisters in a Bronze Age kingdom. Helen here is no legendary beauty who launched a thousand ships but a young woman trying to find some freedom.
Perfect for: Readers who want a realistic Helen of Troy and a story about sisters.
The House of Atreus
7. Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati (2023)
Setting: Sparta and Mycenae
Clytemnestra is raised in Sparta to fight, hunt and never show weakness. Married first to King Tantalus and then, by force, to Agamemnon, she becomes queen of Mycenae, and the novel follows her as she learns to rule in a world that wants her silent.
Casati studied Ancient Greek in Italy, and this debut is fierce, fast and often brutal. It gives one of Greek tragedy’s most hated women a full life and her own reasons. Readers should know it includes scenes of violence and sexual assault.
Perfect for: Readers who want a ruthless heroine and a story that does not look away.
8. Elektra by Jennifer Saint (2022)
Setting: Mycenae and Troy
Three women are bound to the doomed house of Atreus: Clytemnestra, the queen; Cassandra, the Trojan princess whose prophecies no one believes; and Elektra, the daughter who worships her absent father, Agamemnon. Their stories run side by side through the long years of the war.
Saint follows the same pattern as her debut, Ariadne, putting women at the centre of a story usually told through its men. The three voices make the curse on the family feel like a trap closing slowly around everyone in it.
Perfect for: Readers who liked Ariadne and want the Trojan War seen from Mycenae.
The Odyssey
9. Circe by Madeline Miller (2018)
Setting: The halls of Helios and the island of Aiaia
Circe is the daughter of the sun god Helios, but she has none of her family’s power or beauty. When she discovers a talent for witchcraft, the gods banish her to the island of Aiaia. Over the centuries that follow, her path crosses with Daedalus, the Minotaur, Medea and, eventually, Odysseus.
In the Odyssey, Circe is the witch who turns men into pigs. Miller turns her into one of the great heroines of modern fiction, a woman who builds a life on her own terms. Circe keeps the gods at the centre, so it sits at the fantasy end of this list, but its world is rich and solid.
Perfect for: Readers who loved The Song of Achilles and want more of Miller’s world.
10. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (2005)
Setting: Sparta and Ithaca, narrated from the underworld
Penelope, faithful wife of Odysseus, speaks from Hades and gives her own version of the Odyssey. She has her doubts about her husband’s tall tales, and very little love for her cousin Helen. Alongside her, the chorus of twelve maids hanged on Odysseus’s return asks why no one ever told their side.
Atwood wrote the book for the Canongate Myths series, and it is short, sharp and funny, with songs and verse from the maids woven through Penelope’s story. It is the best place to start for readers who think they don’t like myth retellings.
Perfect for: Readers who want wit, and a short book with a sting in it.
11. Ithaca by Claire North (2022)
Setting: Ithaca, while Odysseus is still away
Odysseus has been gone for many years, and nearly a hundred suitors fill his hall, waiting for Penelope to give up and choose a new king. There are raiders on the coast and no men of fighting age left to defend the island. Penelope has no official power at all, so she rules in secret.
The story is told by the goddess Hera, sharp tongued and furious at her own reduced place among the gods, who quietly takes Penelope’s side. Ithaca opens North’s Songs of Penelope trilogy, a political thriller in Bronze Age dress.
Perfect for: Readers who like court intrigue and clever heroines.
12. The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason (2010)
Setting: Troy, Ithaca and the shifting world of the Odyssey
Presented as fragments of lost variants of the Odyssey, Mason’s book retells Odysseus’s story again and again, each time differently. In one he never leaves Ithaca. In another he is Agamemnon’s assassin. Achilles, Helen, Penelope and the Cyclops reappear in new shapes.
It was first published by a small press in 2008 and revised for a wider audience in 2010. It is the most unusual book on this list, more puzzle than plot, and best read in short sittings, one chapter at a time.
Perfect for: Readers who know the Odyssey well and want to see it turned inside out.
Theseus, Crete and Athens
13. The King Must Die by Mary Renault (1958)
Setting: Troizen, Eleusis, Athens and Minoan Crete
Young Theseus, who believes he is the son of Poseidon, sets out from Troizen to find his father in Athens. His journey takes him through bandit country and a kingdom where kings are sacrificed, and finally to Crete, where he becomes a bull dancer in the great palace of Knossos.
Renault was the pioneer of everything on this list. She read the Theseus legend as if it had really happened, drawing on the archaeology of Minoan Crete, and the result is a Bronze Age world that feels completely real. The story continues in The Bull from the Sea (see the honourable mentions).
Perfect for: Readers who want the myth as history, and the classic that started it all.
14. Ariadne by Jennifer Saint (2021)
Setting: Crete and Naxos
Ariadne is a princess of Crete, daughter of King Minos, and her half brother is the Minotaur that lives in the labyrinth beneath the palace. When Theseus arrives as one of the young Athenians sent as tribute to the monster, Ariadne decides to help him, with consequences she cannot foresee.
Saint tells the story through Ariadne and her younger sister Phaedra, two women whose lives are shaped by the men and gods around them. It was Saint’s debut and a bestseller, and it pairs well with The King Must Die, which tells the same story from Theseus’s side.
Perfect for: Readers who want the labyrinth story from the women’s side.
15. Phaedra by Laura Shepperson (2023)
Setting: Athens
Phaedra, the young Cretan princess, is married to Theseus, now king of Athens, and lives under the watchful eye of her stepson Hippolytus. When she publicly accuses him of attacking her, the city must decide who to believe. The men of Athens gather to weigh the case, while the women, who have no vote, meet in secret.
In Euripides’ play, Phaedra is a woman destroyed by forbidden desire. Shepperson turns the myth into a story about who is believed, told through Phaedra, her maid, the king’s adviser and a chorus of Athenian women. It was published in the UK as The Heroines.
Perfect for: Readers who like courtroom drama and a story that feels very current.
Thebes, Heroes and Monsters
16. The Children of Jocasta by Natalie Haynes (2017)
Setting: Thebes, across two generations
Jocasta is married as a girl to the king of Thebes. Years later, her daughter Ismene lives in a city haunted by what happened to her family. Haynes moves between the two women’s stories, a generation apart.
The myth of Oedipus is one of the darkest in Greek tragedy, and Haynes retells it with a strong dose of realism, as a story about people rather than fate. Readers who know Sophocles will find the story changed in surprising ways.
Perfect for: Readers who know Oedipus Rex and want to see it from the women’s side.
17. Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes (2022)
Setting: The edges of the Greek world, home of the Gorgons
Medusa is the only mortal among three Gorgon sisters, raised with love by her two immortal siblings. Then a god’s violence and a goddess’s anger change her forever, and her path leads, as myth says it must, toward a young hero named Perseus.
Haynes tells the story through a whole chorus of voices, including gods, the Gorgons and Perseus himself, and she is very funny about the gods’ vanity. Underneath, it is a serious book about how a victim becomes a monster in the stories people tell.
Perfect for: Readers who want a monster story that turns out to be about justice.
18. Atalanta by Jennifer Saint (2023)
Setting: The wild forests of Arcadia and the voyage of the Argo
Abandoned as a baby on a mountainside, Atalanta is raised by bears under the protection of the goddess Artemis. She grows into a huntress who can outrun any man, and she wants to prove it by joining Jason and the Argonauts on their quest for the Golden Fleece.
This is Saint’s most adventurous novel, with a heroine who is far more than anyone’s wife or daughter. It works well for readers who want action and a classic quest alongside the questions about women’s place that run through all of Saint’s books.
Perfect for: Readers who want an adventure story and a heroine who acts.
19. The Shadow of Perseus by Claire Heywood (2023)
Setting: Argos and the islands and coasts around it
Perseus is the hero who killed Medusa and saved Andromeda from the sea monster. Heywood tells his story through three women who knew him: his mother Danae, cast out by her father because of a prophecy; Medusa; and Andromeda, his wife.
As in Daughters of Sparta, Heywood leaves the gods and monsters out and reads the myth as something that happened to real people. Through these three women, the great hero looks very different, and not much like a hero at all.
Perfect for: Readers who like stories that turn a hero’s legend upside down.
After Troy
20. Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (2008)
Setting: Latium in early Italy, at the end of Aeneas’s wanderings
In Virgil’s Aeneid, Lavinia, the princess Aeneas marries in Italy, never says a word. Le Guin gives her a voice. Her mother wants her to marry a local prince, but the omens point to a stranger, a Trojan warrior who arrives with the last survivors of Troy.
Le Guin is best known for science fiction and fantasy, and this was her last novel. It is quiet and beautifully written, with Lavinia talking across the centuries to the poet who created her. It won the Locus Award in 2009.
Perfect for: Readers who want to follow the Trojan story to its very end.
Honourable Mentions
These books didn’t make the numbered list, but they are well worth reading. Several are sequels to picks above.
- The Women of Troy (2021) and The Voyage Home (2024) by Pat Barker. The second and third books of her Trojan trilogy, which began with The Silence of the Girls.
- House of Odysseus (2023) and The Last Song of Penelope (2024) by Claire North. The second and third books of the Songs of Penelope trilogy, which began with Ithaca.
- The Bull from the Sea (1962) by Mary Renault. The sequel to The King Must Die, following Theseus as king of Athens.
- Hera (2024) by Jennifer Saint. The queen of the gods tells her own story, from the war against the Titans onward.
- Galatea by Madeline Miller. A short story rather than a novel, retelling the myth of Pygmalion’s statue from the statue’s point of view.
- Medusa (2021) by Jessie Burton. A short, illustrated retelling written for young adults, and a good first myth retelling for teenage readers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Greek mythology retelling to start with?
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller is the best place to start for most readers: it is moving, easy to read and the book that started the modern boom in retellings. For something shorter and funnier, try Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. For the myth read as real history, start with Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.
Is Greek mythology retelling historical fiction?
Many of these novels are. Writers such as Mary Renault, Claire Heywood and Natalie Haynes in The Children of Jocasta take the gods out and set the myths in a believable Bronze Age world, which makes them historical fiction in all but name. Others, such as Circe and Ithaca, keep the gods on stage and sit closer to historical fantasy.
In what order should I read Madeline Miller’s books?
Her two novels can be read in either order, since each stands alone. Most readers start with The Song of Achilles (2011) and then read Circe (2018). Her short story Galatea can be read at any time.
Which Greek myth retellings are about the Trojan War?
The Song of Achilles, The Silence of the Girls, A Thousand Ships, Ransom, Cassandra and Daughters of Sparta all retell the Trojan War from different sides. Pat Barker continues the story after the fall of the city in The Women of Troy and The Voyage Home.
Are there Greek myth retellings told from women’s points of view?
Most of the books on this list are. The Silence of the Girls follows Briseis, A Thousand Ships gathers the women of the war, Clytemnestra and Elektra retell the House of Atreus, and Jennifer Saint and Claire Heywood both build their novels around women who are minor figures in the original myths.
What are the best retellings of the Odyssey?
Circe by Madeline Miller, The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and Ithaca by Claire North all retell the Odyssey through the women Odysseus meets or leaves behind. For something experimental, try The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason.
Are Greek mythology novels suitable for teenagers?
Some are, but many retellings include war, violence and sexual assault, as the original myths do. Medusa by Jessie Burton was written for young adults, and The Song of Achilles and Atalanta are popular with older teenagers. The Silence of the Girls and Clytemnestra are better kept for adult readers.
What should I read after this list?
For novels set in historical Greece, from the Persian Wars to Alexander the Great, see our Best Ancient Greece Historical Fiction list. Our Ancient World hub brings together everything set in the ancient Mediterranean, and our Pat Barker and Madeline Miller author pages cover their books in full.