7 Books Written in the Shadow of Homer
19 May, 2026Christopher Nolan is bringing The Odyssey to cinemas on 17 July 2026, and the scale of it is genuinely staggering. Matt Damon plays Odysseus. Tom Holland is Telemachus. Anne Hathaway is Penelope. The supporting cast includes Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theron, and Jon Bernthal. IMDB ranked it the most anticipated film of 2026, and if you are a voracious reader (which, if you are here, you are), that is your cue to go straight to the source.
Here is a truth nobody in our book community will argue with, Homer has never been out of print. Not once. Not for roughly 2,800 years. The Odyssey, that sprawling, wine-dark, monster-haunted saga of a man just trying to get home, has been copied, translated, plundered, adored, and furiously reimagined by writers across every century since it was first performed aloud to people who had absolutely no idea they were listening to literature.
We have put together seven books that carry Homeric DNA most explicitly. Some are direct retellings. Some are structural borrowings so clever you almost miss them. All of them are essential reading, and all of them will give you a richer lens through which to watch Nolan’s film and a much deeper appreciation of what Homer was actually doing with themes of homecoming (Nostos), loyalty and devotion, cunning over strength (Metis), hospitality (Xenia), and justice and vengeance.
Let’s get into it!
Circe by Madeline Miller
Miller takes one of The Odyssey’s most consequential supporting characters, the witch who turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs and then becomes his ally and lover, and gives her the full epic treatment, birth to mortality, power discovered, exiled, weaponised, and, eventually, relinquished.
Homer’s blueprint is obvious, but Miller does something genuinely audacious. She does not retell The Odyssey, she surrounds it. Circe’s island receives the Argonauts, Daedalus, Medea, and half the population of Greek myth. Odysseus himself is just one chapter in a long, luminous life. The effect is vertiginous. You realise The Odyssey has always been just one angle of a much larger, older, and far more female world.
Miller’s prose is spare and radiant, and her Circe is not a villain with a redemption arc. She is a woman in the long process of finding her own power and, crucially, finding her voice. That is a very Odyssean question at its core (Metis).
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Atwood gives Penelope her own voice. This is the woman who waited twenty years, who outmanoeuvred a hundred suitors with nothing but a loom and her wits, who is praised by every character in The Odyssey and actually heard by none of them. She speaks from the underworld, with the twelve hanged maids forming a Greek chorus to haunt everyone involved.
The twelve maids have always been the part of The Odyssey that sits badly with modern readers, and it has never sat well with Atwood either. Here, she centres their voices alongside Penelope’s to interrogate those deaths directly and to ask uncomfortable questions about who gets to be the hero of a story and who gets punished when the hero comes home.
It is short. It is ruthless. It is funny in the way that only someone who has been condescended to for three thousand years can be funny. Penelope’s narration is the most elegant piece of literary revenge we have read. She is not bitter. She is precise. If The Odyssey is the epic of the man who left, The Penelopiad is the reckoning of the woman who stayed.
A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
Haynes is a classicist, comedian, broadcaster, and one of the most genuinely witty writers currently working in historical fiction. She opens A Thousand Ships with the muse refusing Homer’s premise outright. She wants to sing of the women, and so she does.
What follows is the Trojan War and its aftermath, the lead-up to The Odyssey, told through the fractured, polyphonic voices of every woman touched by it. Penelope, Hecuba, Clytemnestra, Calypso, and Cassandra, whose chapters are harrowing in a way that made us put the book down and stare at the ceiling. And Helen, who gets blamed for everything and gets to say nothing about it.
The Odyssey’s influence is structural. This is explicitly a nostos story told from the perspectives of those left behind while Odysseus wanders. Haynes has a mordant wit and absolutely no patience for the idea that the women of the Trojan myth are decoration. Her Calypso is trapped on her island, furious at Hermes, trying to hold onto something she knows is already leaving. It is one of the finest short portraits of longing we have encountered in recent fiction.
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
Here is where things get interesting. Towles does not retell The Odyssey. He uses it. Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is released from a juvenile work farm in 1954 Nebraska, intending to drive west to California with his younger brother Billy to start a new life. He ends up going east. For ten days. Across America. Because two fellow escapees hijack the plan and everything goes sideways in precisely the way Poseidon takes Odysseus’s raft and everything goes sideways for about a decade.
Towles is explicit about the Homeric influence. Billy is nine years old, brilliant, and heartbroken, and he navigates the entire journey using a book of legends and myths. He is the Telemachus figure, the son searching for the father, growing up through the act of searching itself. That is a direct structural lift from the Telemachy, the first four books of The Odyssey, in which Telemachus sets off to find news of his missing father and becomes, in the searching, someone capable of actually receiving him.
The Lincoln Highway is plotted with the precision of a Swiss watch and is also, we have to say, occasionally maddening. Emmett is a fundamentally decent person surrounded by chaos agents who keep steering him wrong, and as readers you can feel Homer’s hand pushing the plot. That is not a criticism. That is the point. Odysseus did not ask for monsters either.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Doerr’s follow-up to All the Light We Cannot See, a Pulitzer winner is a structural miracle. Five storylines, three time periods: 15th-century Constantinople, present-day Idaho, and a generation ship somewhere in the far future. What binds them all together is a single fictional ancient text, a comic Greek fable about a shepherd who wants to be turned into a bird so he can fly to a paradise in the sky. The Odyssey and The Iliad make explicit appearances throughout.
The novel is fundamentally about how stories survive, how they are copied and lost and found and saved and passed across centuries by people who desperately need them. The generation ship in the far future is literally called the Argos, a direct nod to Jason’s vessel from Greek mythology, the same ship that appears in Circe. Homer is in Doerr’s marrow.
The whole project is an act of Homeric faith, that a story told well enough becomes indestructible. That storytelling itself is a nostos, a homecoming to something essential in us. Some readers find the multiple timelines dizzying at first, and we will be honest, the opening asks for patience. But Doerr’s writing has a gravitational pull that rewards every page of commitment.
Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta by James Hannaham
This is the retelling you did not know you needed. Hannaham’s Carlotta Mercedes is an Afro-Colombian trans woman released from a men’s prison in Ithaca, New York, after twenty years inside, trying to make her way back to Brooklyn and her family over the Fourth of July weekend.
She has been transformed by her imprisonment into someone her family no longer recognises. The city she wanders has been gentrified beyond recognition. She encounters a figure who functions like the Cyclops, a situation that echoes the Sirens, and a Penelope figure at home whose waiting has curdled into something far more complicated than weaving at a loom. Hannaham has confirmed the novel was directly inspired by Homer alongside James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The structural genius is that Carlotta’s wandering is simultaneously mythic and mundanely contemporary. The alternating first and third person narration asks, at every turn, who gets to tell whose story and who is allowed to be the hero of an epic. Carlotta is achingly sad and relentlessly resilient. She is so acutely aware of the absurdity of the cruelties she suffers that she can almost convince herself she is the lead in her own strange sitcom rather than someone living a life nearly emptied of hope. It is impossible not to root for her.
The Los Angeles Times called it “dangerously hilarious”. We would add “dangerously brilliant”.
Odyssey by Stephen Fry
Fry completed his mythology series with this 2024 retelling, following Mythos, Heroes, and Troy, and if you have read any of those you already know what you are in for, a deeply knowledgeable, warmly comedic, unapologetically enthusiastic guide through a story that Fry clearly considers one of the great pleasures of being alive and literate.
This is not a feminist reimagining or a structural experiment. It is The Odyssey, told by someone who has loved it for decades and wants, with infectious sincerity, for you to love it too. What Fry does brilliantly is pace. He makes the sheer operatic disaster of it feel current and comprehensible without softening the genuine horror. The Cyclops episode is as terrifying as it should be. Circe’s island is genuinely sensual. The Sirens are properly existentially horrifying.
And Penelope. Fry is clearly a Penelope partisan, and it shows. His final chapters, covering the reunion, the reckoning, and the long-delayed exhale, are handled with real emotional intelligence. The Odyssey is famously baggy in some translations. Fry cuts the fat without losing the flavour, and if you have never read the original, this is a magnificent place to start.
The Bottom Line
The Odyssey is not a story that ever really ends. It is a story that keeps arriving in different bodies, different cities, different centuries, still asking the same questions. What does it cost to be away? What waits for you at home? And when you finally get there, after all the monsters and all the years, are you still the person who left?
Every book on this list exists because someone read Homer and could not leave it alone. That is the highest compliment you can pay a 2,800-year-old poem. Pick up at least one of these, watch Nolan’s film then come back and tell us what you thought in the comments.
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