Recommendations
Books Like Ariadne
Two sisters at the edge of the myth — what the heroes take, what the women build from the ruins
Jennifer Saint's Ariadne takes the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur — a story usually told as a hero's triumph — and tells it from the inside. Ariadne gave Theseus the thread that let him survive the Labyrinth and then kill her brother; what happened after is the story the myth forgets to tell. Her sister Phaedra carries the rest. Both are daughters of a king whose cruelty created the monster in the first place. If the lyrical feminist perspective, the ancient Greek world brought close and intimate, and the sense of a story happening to you rather than around you gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.
- 1Buy
Circe
by Madeline Miller
The most direct companion to Ariadne — a woman at the margins of Greek mythology who has been dismissed as a footnote in other people's myths tells her own story. Miller's prose and Saint's prose pursue the same goal: making the ancient world feel as immediate as the room you're sitting in.
- 2Buy
The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
The Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus, who loved Achilles — Miller's debut establishes that the heroes of myth are most interesting when seen through the eyes of the people who loved them. Ariadne readers who want more ancient Greece and the same quality of prose should read this next.
- 3Buy
Elektra
by Jennifer Saint
Saint's own follow-up to Ariadne — three women at the center of the Trojan War's aftermath, including Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and Elektra. Same author, same approach, completely standalone.
- 4Buy
The Women of Troy
by Pat Barker
The fall of Troy through the eyes of its women — Barker's The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy are the most literary predecessors to what Saint is doing in Ariadne, and Barker has been doing it longer. The rage and grief of women on the losing side of a myth is handled with unflinching directness.
- 5Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
A mystery set in a house that is a labyrinth — and a story about a man who has forgotten who he is because someone needed him to be useful. The labyrinth at the center of Ariadne's myth and the labyrinth at the center of Piranesi are differently strange but both about the same thing: what it means to be trapped, and what it takes to find the thread.
- 6Buy
Beartown
by Fredrik Backman
A contemporary novel that does what mythology always did — show how communities maintain stories that protect the powerful and silence the ones who were harmed. Readers who respond to the core project of Ariadne (reclaiming the story from the heroes) consistently find Backman's most challenging novel does the same work in a modern setting.
- 7Buy
The Priory of the Orange Tree
by Samantha Shannon
A world-spanning fantasy about women who hold institutional power while still being limited by the mythologies around them — Shannon's epic scope and the dragon mythology at its center give Ariadne readers the same sense of a world that was built by storytelling and must be rebuilt by it.
- 8Buy
A Memory Called Empire
by Arkady Martine
An ambassador to an empire that absorbed her small station piece by piece, navigating a court that assumes she's peripheral — Martine writes colonialism and cultural erasure with the same precision that Saint writes mythological erasure, and the political machinery of the Teixcalaan Empire has Crete's same systemic weight.
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