Recommendations
Books Like The Odyssey
Best books to read after The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey defined the homecoming story — the long journey, the monsters, the loyal wife, the disguised return. Homer's epic is also a guide to cunning over strength, and to the idea that the journey shapes the traveler. These books share its adventure, its meditation on home and identity, and its engagement with myth.
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The Iliad
by Homer
Homer's other epic — the story of the Trojan War itself, centered on the wrath of Achilles and culminating in the death of Hector; the events of the Odyssey follow from the Iliad, and reading both gives the complete picture of the Greek heroic tradition: the Iliad is about communal fate and the cost of kleos (glory), while the Odyssey is about the individual journey and the desire for home (nostos)
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Circe
by Madeline Miller
Miller's feminist retelling narrates the myth from the witch's perspective — Circe, who appears in the Odyssey as the enchantress who transforms Odysseus's men into pigs, becomes the protagonist of her own 4,000-year story of self-discovery and power; one of the finest contemporary retellings of classical material, which uses the Homeric world to ask questions about agency, voice, and what it means to be female in a world of gods and heroes
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The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
Miller's earlier novel retells the Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus, Achilles's beloved companion, as a love story — direct prequel to the events of the Odyssey in terms of chronology, and equally remarkable in its ability to make the ancient world feel contemporary and emotionally immediate; Miller's Achilles is both the great hero of legend and a recognizable young man
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The Penelopiad
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope's perspective — the waiting, the suitors, the weaving that she unravels each night, the twenty-year fidelity to a husband who has been with Circe and Calypso; Atwood's Penelope is wry, intelligent, and justifiably irritated, and the twelve hanged maids who haunt the margins of Homer's poem become the novel's Greek chorus demanding their own story
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The Aeneid
by Virgil
Virgil's Latin epic about the Trojan hero Aeneas's journey from Troy to Italy, where he founds the civilization that will become Rome — self-consciously modeled on both Homeric epics and often read as a dialogue with the Odyssey about empire, fate, and heroism; where Odysseus's goal is personal (home), Aeneas's is historical (the founding of Rome), and the comparison illuminates the difference between Greek and Roman conceptions of heroic purpose
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Ulysses
by James Joyce
Joyce's modernist novel set in a single day in Dublin in 1904 maps the experiences of Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom onto the structure of the Odyssey — one episode per chapter, each corresponding to a Homeric episode — transforming a Bronze Age Greek epic into a portrait of one man's ordinary Thursday; the most ambitious literary riff on the Odyssey in any language
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East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's epic novel about two families in the Salinas Valley of California over several generations — Steinbeck described it as his own Odyssey, his attempt to write the foundational American narrative; like the Odyssey it is concerned with homecoming, with sons and fathers, with the long journey, and with the question of whether people can choose to be good
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Lonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning western about two retired Texas Rangers driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana is explicitly modeled on the Odyssey: the long journey, the episodic encounters, the two companions with complementary personalities (cunning Gus and dutiful Call), the theme of nostos and the impossibility of going back to what was — the American frontier as the Aegean Sea
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