Recommendations

Books Like Circe

The witch of Greek mythology tells her own story — and it's nothing like what the heroes said

Madeline Miller's Circe opens on Olympus, where the daughter of Helios the sun god is too strange for her family — with a mortal voice and no apparent power in a world of gods. When she discovers she can transform beings and things using words and will, she is exiled to the island of Aeaea, where she will spend millennia alone, slowly growing into her own power. Over the centuries she meets Daedalus, the Minotaur, Jason and Medea, Odysseus, and her own terrifying mother — and finally understands that she alone decides what she becomes. If the lyrical prose, the feminist reclaiming of a mythological figure defined by what heroes did to her, the deep meditation on what power actually is, and Miller's extraordinary world gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.