Six Brilliant Reads: What to Read After Seeing The Odyssey

31 July 2026

The story that inspired Christopher Nolan’s new blockbuster, Homer’s Odyssey describes the eponymous hero, King of Ithaca, a war veteran who has spent ten years fighting the Trojans. Now at last he’s on his way home. But having angered the god Poseidon, a curse dooms him to travel the seas, battling monsters and lured by demi-gods, his patient wife Penelope waiting at home, beset with suitors eager to be Ithaca’s next king.

Such a good story, it has understandably inspired writers ever since. Here are just a few.

Stephen Fry’s Mythos series is for anyone who is wanting a very readable and accessible version of Ancient Greek legends. Odyssey is the fourth in the series describing Odysseus’s return home, a journey that takes ten years. He has encounters with the cyclops, lotus-eaters and alluring sirens, shipwrecks, battles, monsters and enchantments. He’s going to have to think on his feet if he wants to get safely home.

One of Odysseus’s diversions involves the demi-goddess and witch, Circe, the main character in Madeline Miller’s novel of the same name. Circe, a daughter of the Titan Helios, is cast out of her family home when she becomes aware of her abilities as a witch. Zeus banishes her to the island of Aiaia. Various men, both gods and mortals, become part of her story, among them, Odysseus. Always a question in Circe’s mind is whether she belongs with the deities she was born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

Other authors have drawn on the story of Penelope, Odysseus’s queen, and what has been happening in Ithaca in the meantime. Claire North’s trilogy of novels, Songs of Penelope, begins with Ithaca, where the queen has been waiting for seventeen years. As people speculate that the king is dead, suitors arrive hoping to be strong enough to take the throne. Whatever Penelope chooses has the potential to throw the country into war.

The following book, House of Odysseus sees Penelope’s careful endeavours to keep the peace upset by the arrival of Orestes, King of Mycenae and his sister Elektra. The king has blood on his hands, that of his mother Queen Clytemnestra, in revenge for her killing of his father. Meanwhile his uncle, Menelaus, is keen to seize the throne for himself. Can Penelope save her own throne between these warring factions, and from the meddling of the gods?

And the final book, The Last Song of Penelope, begins when a beggar arrives at the palace, where suitors still vie for Penelope’s hand, a beggar that the queen recognises as her husband. Will there be reconciliation or retribution?

Margaret Atwood has also penned a version of Odysseus’s return with The Penelopiad. Penelope has managed to wait for her husband for twenty years, bring up her son, keep peace and stave off a hundred or more suitors. The arrival of her husband throws up even more challenges for this quintessentially faithful wife – a story told in the voices of Penelope and her twelve hanged maids.

More modern twists on the story of Odysseus include James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (the Roman name for the Greek hero) which was published in 1922. Told over sixteen hours in a single day in 1904, we follow Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Daedalus through their interactions, relating them to the classic characters of Odysseus, Penelope and Telemachus. An experimental work, the novel uses stream of consciousness narration to great effect and is so well-regarded that the story is celebrated in Dublin as Bloomsday, on 16 June, 

Set around the time of the American Civil War, Charles Frazier’s novel Cold Mountain charts the long, odyssey-like journey home of Inman, a wounded soldier and deserter, back to Ada, his pre-war sweetheart. Ada has been struggling with the loss of her father, battling to make a living from the family farm in Cold Mountain where she is considered an outsider. A haunting novel about love and loss, Cold Mountain was made into an epic film in 2003 starring Jude Law, Fiona Kidman and Renée Zellweger.

Posted by JAM

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