What did you love about The Odyssey?
An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
An Odyssey follows a father and son retracing Odysseus's route on a cruise, their own relationship unfolding slowly.
Circe
Circe gives you a divine immortal watching humans age and suffer across centuries she cannot escape.
The Silence of the Girls
The Silence of the Girls shows the Trojan War through Briseis, the enslaved woman treated as property.
6 books like The Odyssey
- The Odyssey by Homer (tr. Emily Wilson) — Emily Wilson's 2017 translation is the one that made Homer feel new again — the first English transl…
- Circe by Madeline Miller — The witch who turns men into pigs gets her own story — from her childhood among the Titans to her ex…
- The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller — The Trojan War — the event Odysseus is sailing home from — told through the love between Achilles an…
- An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic by Daniel Mendelsohn — A classics professor invites his 81-year-old father to sit in on his undergraduate seminar on The Od…
- The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker — The Iliad retold from the perspective of Briseis — the enslaved queen whose 'ownership' by Achilles …
- Piranesi by Susanna Clarke — A man lives in an impossible, infinite House of halls and staircases flooded by tides and filled wit…
Picked for the feeling of The Odyssey, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Nolan's Odyssey turns Homer's homecoming into a visceral, IMAX-scale experience — but the story's power has always been intimate: a man trying to get back to his wife and son, tested by gods, monsters, and his own stubbornness. These books share that mythic undertow — journeys where the destination matters less than what the road reveals about who you are.
The Odyssey
Emily Wilson's 2017 translation is the one that made Homer feel new again — the first English translation by a woman, and the first to render the Greek in the same number of lines as the original. Her Odysseus is more complicated than the standard hero: cunning, selfish, charismatic, and sometimes cruel. If the film made you want to read the source, this is the version that will actually hold your attention.
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Circe
The witch who turns men into pigs gets her own story — from her childhood among the Titans to her exile on Aeaea to her encounter with Odysseus, who is just one chapter in a life that spans millennia. Miller's retelling shares the film's scale but inverts the perspective: Odysseus is a guest star in someone else's epic, and Circe's transformation from powerless immortal to self-made witch is the real homecoming.
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The Song of Achilles
The Trojan War — the event Odysseus is sailing home from — told through the love between Achilles and Patroclus. Miller writes battle with the same kinetic brutality that Nolan brings to IMAX, but the heart of the novel is a relationship so tender it makes the slaughter feel like the crime it is. It's the prequel to The Odyssey that Homer didn't write, and it's devastating.
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An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic
A classics professor invites his 81-year-old father to sit in on his undergraduate seminar on The Odyssey — and the two men end up on a Mediterranean cruise retracing Odysseus's route. Mendelsohn weaves Homer's text with his own father-son story in a way that makes both feel newly alive. If the film moved you, this memoir will show you why the poem has moved people for three thousand years.
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The Silence of the Girls
The Iliad retold from the perspective of Briseis — the enslaved queen whose 'ownership' by Achilles and Agamemnon triggers the war's climax. Barker's novel asks who gets to be the hero of an epic and who gets reduced to a plot device. It's a brutal, necessary corrective to the glamour of both Homer and Hollywood, and it makes you rethink every scene where a woman stands silently in the background of a war story.
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Piranesi
A man lives in an impossible, infinite House of halls and staircases flooded by tides and filled with classical statues — and he can't remember how he got there or who he was before. Clarke's novel shares The Odyssey's mythic architecture: a labyrinth that is both a prison and a kind of paradise, and a protagonist whose journey home requires first remembering that home exists. It's the most Homeric novel of the last decade.
Read it with your book club →Is The Odyssey based on a book?
The Odyssey is based on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey.
What should I read if I loved The Odyssey?
Start with The Odyssey, Circe and The Song of Achilles. 6 books on this page were picked for the feeling of The Odyssey, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like The Odyssey?
The Odyssey by Homer (tr. Emily Wilson). Emily Wilson's 2017 translation is the one that made Homer feel new again — the first English translation by a woman, and the first to render the Greek in the same number of lines as the original.
These are for everyone who loved The Odyssey. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved The Odyssey and A Fistful of Dollars reads different books from someone who loved The Odyssey and Die Hard. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — The Odyssey already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.