Books like The Song of Achilles
What should you read after Madeline Miller’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Madeline Miller
- 2011
- 378 pages
- Mythology
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Song of Achilles
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchCirce
Madeline Miller
Miller's other one, and the better novel of the two: the same sentences, the same gods, but a heroine who gets a whole life instead of a foregone conclusion.
- Madeline Miller's prose
- Greek myth retold
- Devotion and loyalty
- No central love story
Best for tenderness between menCall Me by Your Name
André Aciman
A summer in Italy rather than a war at Troy, but the same helpless first love and the same narrator who knows from the opening page how it ends.
- Tenderness between men
- A love story you know ends badly
- Madeline Miller's prose
- Contemporary, no myth
Best for the Iliad retoldThe Silence of the Girls
Pat Barker
The same nine years at Troy from Briseis's side of the camp, and Barker makes very clear what Achilles looks like to the people he happens to own.
- The Iliad retold
- Greek myth retold
- A love story you know ends badly
- No tenderness on offer
Great matchA Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
Haynes hands the war to its women — Briseis, Hecuba, Penelope and the rest — in short chapters, sharper and funnier than Miller and every bit as angry.
- Greek myth retold
- The Iliad retold
- Madeline Miller's prose
- No single protagonist
Great matchAriadne
Jennifer Saint
Written for exactly this shelf: another mortal narrating her own myth, with Theseus proving every bit as poor a bet as anyone in Miller's Troy.
- Greek myth retold
- A love story you know ends badly
- Madeline Miller's prose
- Prose noticeably thinner
Worth a look — with a warningA Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
For the devotion rather than the myth: two men whose loyalty to each other is the spine of a very long book, and it will cost you something to read.
- Devotion and loyalty
- Tenderness between men
- A love story you know ends badly
- Sustained abuse and self-harm
What should you read after The Song of Achilles?
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Circe by Madeline Miller — miller's other one, and the better novel of the two: the same sentences, the same gods, but a heroine who gets a whole life instead of a foregone conclusion.
If what stayed with you was tenderness between men, read Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman instead: a summer in Italy rather than a war at Troy, but the same helpless first love and the same narrator who knows from the opening page how it ends. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker is the other strong option — the same nine years at Troy from Briseis's side of the camp, and Barker makes very clear what Achilles looks like to the people he happens to own.
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