5 mythological retellings to read if 'The Odyssey' left you wanting more

Every generation rediscovers Homer on its own terms. This one has done it through a run of new translations and screen adaptations, and the usual thing has happened: readers went back to The Odyssey, then straight past it, looking for what Homer left out. It's a story told almost entirely from one man's point of view. The women in it, the enemies, even the gods, mostly exist to get in his way home. The five novels below hand the story to whoever the original epic pushed aside.

'The Forest of Enchantments' by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Ten years after retelling the Mahabharata from Draupadi's viewpoint in The Palace of Illusions, Divakaruni does the same thing to the Ramayana, this time through Sita. Valmiki's version keeps her devoted and mostly quiet. Divakaruni's doesn't. Her Sita gets to be furious about the banishment to the forest, the separation from Ram, and a trial by fire she is made to undergo just to be believed. Kaikeyi, Surpanakha and Mandodari all get more space too, enough that they stop feeling like plot devices and start feeling like women with reasons of their own. It reads less like scripture and more like a long-overdue cross-examination.

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'Ariadne' by Jennifer Saint

Ariadne hands Theseus the thread that gets him out of the labyrinth after he kills the Minotaur. He thanks her by abandoning her on Naxos and sailing home without her. Jennifer Saint's debut builds an entire novel out of what happens next: a second life on the island as the wife of Dionysus, and a parallel one for her sister Phaedra, who marries Theseus and inherits a share of the ruin herself. It is a small, specific betrayal in Greek mythology, barely a paragraph in most retellings. Saint stretches it into a book, and it holds.

'Circe' or 'The Song of Achilles' by Madeline Miller

Either book works as a next stop after Homer, and Miller has done more than most to make the modern mythological retelling a genre of its own. Circe goes back to an unlikely beginning: an awkward, overlooked daughter of the sun god Helios, banished to the island of Aeaea for a crime the gods find more embarrassing than dangerous, where she teaches herself magic long before Odysseus ever washes ashore in Book 10 of The Odyssey. The Song of Achilles runs the other way, into the Iliad, told through Patroclus rather than Achilles. The Trojan War's most famous rage becomes, in Miller's hands, the aftermath of a very private grief.

'Daughter of the Moon Goddess' by Sue Lynn Tan

This one leaves the Mediterranean altogether. Chang'e, the Chinese moon goddess, was exiled there for stealing an elixir of immortality meant for her husband, the archer Houyi. Tan doesn't retell that legend so much as continue it: Chang'e has a hidden daughter, Xingyin, who grows up alone on the moon without knowing the Celestial Emperor who banished her mother would see her as a threat too. Once her magic is discovered, she flees to the Celestial Kingdom in disguise and trains alongside its crown prince. The Mid-Autumn Festival tradition runs underneath all of it. Call it a myth extended rather than retold, but the ache of a mother and daughter kept apart by gods will feel familiar to any Odyssey reader.

'Gods of Jade and Shadow' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Casiopea Tun is eighteen, unpaid help in her own grandfather's house, and about to open a locked chest she assumes holds money. Instead it holds Hun-Kamé, a Mayan lord of the underworld, dismembered and waiting. A shard of his bone lodges in her hand, binds her to him, and pulls her into his quest to reclaim the body parts and throne his twin brother stole. Yucatán to Jazz Age Mexico City, with the Popol Vuh doing the mythological heavy lifting underneath a plot that owes just as much to Cinderella. The underworld Moreno-Garcia builds, Xibalba, carries the same weight as Homer's own.

Read together, these five make the same case Homer's own audience already understood: whoever tells the story decides who gets remembered. That job was never going to stay confined to one language, one region, or one storyteller.