Books like Circe and The Song of Achilles, ranked by how closely each keeps to its source

The Iliad with the plot taken out. Oswald keeps two things from Homer: the short obituaries of the soldiers who die, about two hundred of them, in the order the poem kills them, and the similes, each one printed twice, like a lament. Achilles and Agamemnon and their quarrel barely appear. Almost nothing here is invented, which is why it is the only tier 5 on the page, but it is selective rather than narrative: it is a book of the dead, not a story, and it is poetry. Of everything here it takes the grief in Miller most seriously and is least like a novel. Differs: no plot, no love story, and no Patroclus at the centre; he is one of the dead among the rest.

Edition: Faber paperback, 4 October 2012, 96 pages. ISBN 9780571274185.

Achilles, out of his mind with grief for Patroclus, drags Hector's body behind his chariot every morning. Priam, the old king of Troy, takes off his royal robes, hires an ordinary carter and his mule, and drives into the Greek camp to ask for his son back, one father to another. It is the same grief as the end of The Song of Achilles, seen from the enemy's side, and the most direct emotional continuation of Miller's novel in print. Book 24's events are all here and in order; Malouf fills the gaps Homer leaves, turning the herald who drives Priam's wagon into the carter Somax, with a life and a mule of his own, and following him past the poem's end. Differs: it is spare and meditative, with Priam at the centre rather than Achilles, and nothing like Miller's romance. In the UK it is a Vintage paperback; stock is patchy, and Blackwell's is the likeliest to have it.

Edition: Vintage paperback, 7 October 2010, 240 pages. ISBN 9780099539520.

Not a translation but a rewriting of selected books of the Iliad in modern verse, which Logue began for a BBC commission in 1959 and left unfinished when he died in 2011. He worked from other people's translations, not the Greek. The collected edition, put together by Christopher Reid, includes “Patrocleia”, in which Patroclus borrows Achilles's armour and goes out to die in it. Where Logue follows Homer, the events are Homer's; what he adds is the camera. Be warned that the style is anachronistic on purpose: modern military and film imagery sits inside Homer's battles, so it is faithful to what happens and not to how Homer says it. It is the book to give anyone who loved how immediate Miller made Homer feel. Differs: it is poetry, not a novel, and it has none of Miller's tenderness; the love is implied, the violence is not.

Edition: Faber paperback (the collected edition, ed. Christopher Reid), 6 July 2017, 352 pages. ISBN 9780571314492.

The Iliad retold in twenty-one first-person monologues by the people in it, Patroclus, Andromache, Priam and others, in the poem's order. Baricco wrote it to be read aloud to audiences in Italy, and it is the quickest way to hear the whole war told by its minor voices, which is Miller's method applied to everybody at once. It sits at tier 4 because the human events are Homer's; but it takes the gods out, and closes with the fall of Troy from sources after the Iliad, so a strict reader could put it at 3. Differs: critics and readers both found the voices sound alike, and some added passages against war feel imposed. It is a solid bridge, not a great book.

Edition: Canongate paperback, 20 March 2008, 176 pages. ISBN 9781847671035.

Theseus tells his own story: a boyhood at Troezen, the road to Athens and the bandits on it, then the tribute ship to Crete, the bull-ring at Knossos and Ariadne. Renault follows Plutarch's Life of Theseus for the early life and the road, then combines it with other versions of the myth and with what archaeology had found at Knossos, and invents most of the Cretan half: the bull-leapers' team, palace politics, a Minotaur who is a man. The gods are what the characters believe in, not characters. That is the same kind of work as Circe, which is why it scores the same. Differs: a man's adventure story with a man's voice, and its Ariadne ends badly. Virago reissued it in 2025 with an introduction by Bettany Hughes; The Bull from the Sea continues it.

Edition: Virago Modern Classics paperback, introduction by Bettany Hughes, 10 July 2025, 416 pages. ISBN 9780349018577.

Jason's voyage for the Golden Fleece, from the gathering of the crew to Medea. Graves follows Apollonius's route but pours in nearly every other variant he could find, adds crew members the Argonautica leaves off, and re-explains the whole myth as a clash between an older goddess-worship and the Olympian gods. It is synthesis on a grand scale, by the man who went on to write The Greek Myths. Differs: it is long, crowded and more interested in religion than in any one person's heart, so it is the least Miller-like book in this tier. In the United States it was published as Hercules, My Shipmate, so check the title if you buy a US copy.

Edition: Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 1 December 2011, 400 pages. ISBN 9780141197647.

The fall of Troy told by Priam's daughter, the prophet no one believes, in a single stream of memory as she waits outside the gates of Mycenae to be killed, where Aeschylus's Agamemnon leaves her. She sees the war coming, and the men who run Troy go ahead anyway. Wolf argues with Homer throughout: the heroes are brutes, Achilles worst of all, and the war is a story the palace tells itself. It is Circe's situation, a woman whose sight is dismissed, told by a writer working in East Germany. Differs: there is no plot in the usual sense, just one voice thinking back, and it is angrier and more political than Miller. In the UK it is a Daunt Books paperback, in stock at Waterstones and Blackwell's. Wolf's four essays on writing it are in the American edition, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays.

Edition: Daunt Books paperback, translated by Jan van Heurck, 1 March 2013, 200 pages. ISBN 9781907970115.

Forty-four short alternative versions of the Odyssey, presented as translations of a lost papyrus: Odysseus never getting home, or coming home to find Penelope has moved on. Nearly every chapter contradicts Homer on purpose, which is the definition of tier 2. It is the natural next book for anyone who finished Circe wanting to stay inside the Odyssey and see it bent. It first appeared in 2008 from Starcherone, a small Buffalo press, after winning its 2007 fiction prize; a revised edition followed in 2010 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and Jonathan Cape in the UK. Differs: this is the cleverest book here and the least felt, and readers who disliked Atwood's The Penelopiad for being arch may feel the same about this.

Edition: Vintage paperback, 5 May 2011, 240 pages. ISBN 9780099547075.

Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for a wind to Troy; Clytemnestra waits years and kills him in his bath; their son Orestes comes back. Tóibín keeps Aeschylus's outline and removes the gods entirely, so no Furies and no trial at Athens, and he invents Orestes's missing years as a hostage and a fugitive. Clytemnestra, Electra and Orestes each get a section. Taking the gods out of the Oresteia changes what the trilogy is about, which is why it is tier 2, not 3. Differs: there is no warmth at all, and it is the coldest book here; read it for Clytemnestra, who is as hard-voiced as Miller's Circe is soft.

Edition: Penguin paperback, 5 April 2018, 272 pages. ISBN 9780241257692.

Antigone in modern Britain. Three siblings from a British Pakistani family in London: Isma, the eldest; her sister Aneeka; and Aneeka's twin Parvaiz, who goes to join the media arm of the Islamic State. The Home Secretary, whose son falls for Aneeka, stands where Creon stands, and the question is the play's: who may bury a brother the state calls a traitor. Shamsie keeps Sophocles's structure and moves everything else, which makes it the clearest tier 1 on the page. It won the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018. Differs: there are no gods and no Greece; this is for readers who loved what Miller did with an old story's moral shape rather than its world.

Edition: Bloomsbury paperback, 13 March 2025, 288 pages. ISBN 9781526679987.

Graves took Samuel Butler's theory (below) that the Odyssey was written by a young woman in Sicily and wrote her story. Nausicaa, a princess in western Sicily, protects her father's throne from a hall full of suitors and arranges a slaughter of them that she will later write into a poem as Odysseus's. The Odyssey's homecoming plot is moved to another island and given to its author, which is a transposition. Differs: it is light and clever rather than moving, and one for completists; it is here because it is the oldest book on the page to put a woman's voice inside Homer.

Edition: Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 26 January 2012, 176 pages. ISBN 9780141197661.