Best mythology retellings
Old stories handed to whoever was left out of them the first time round.
Ranked by how often each title comes up across 10 reading lists on NextBook — not by our opinion of them.
1 of 12recommended on 4 listsCirce
Madeline Miller
An old myth retold from the side of the woman everyone else called a monster — exactly the move Arden makes with the witch of the winter woods, on Greek ground.
2 of 12recommended on 4 listsThe Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Here for the myth-rendered-as-lived-life quality rather than anything wintry; if what moved you was Arden's tenderness toward doomed people, Miller will wreck you the same way.
3 of 12recommended on 3 listsSpinning Silver
Naomi Novik
Novik is doing precisely what Arden does: taking a Slavic winter tale seriously, letting the cold be a kingdom, and handing the whole mess to girls nobody thought to consult.
4 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Bear and the Nightingale
Katherine Arden
Arden does for Russian household spirits what Wecker does for golems and jinn: treats the old stories as literal neighbours rather than metaphor.
5 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe City of Brass
S.A. Chakraborty
Swap Russian frost for Cairo heat and the shape holds: a young woman with inherited power she doesn't understand, dragged into a world whose rules predate her by centuries.
6 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Golem and the Jinni
Helene Wecker
Two beings straight out of their communities' folklore, trying to pass as human in 1899 New York. Wecker treats myth the way Arden does: as something people actually lived beside.
7 of 12recommended on 3 listsThe Ten Thousand Doors of January
Alix E. Harrow
A girl told all her life to be smaller, who finds doors instead. Harrow writes in the same fireside cadence as Arden, with the same argument about who decides what counts as real.
8 of 12recommended on 3 listsUprooted
Naomi Novik
A village girl, an old wizard, and a wood with intentions. Where Arden's danger arrives on the frost, Novik's grows out of the trees — same bones, greener.
9 of 12recommended on 2 listsA Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
Haynes hands the Trojan War to its women, a chapter each, with the muse herself complaining about having been conscripted into telling men's stories again.
10 of 12recommended on 2 listsAriadne
Jennifer Saint
The most direct readalike here: another mythic woman narrating her own abandonment, written squarely for people who closed Circe and wanted the feeling again.
11 of 12recommended on 2 listsDune
Frank Herbert
Herbert does the deep ethnography too: a desert people with religion, ecology and manners worked out to the last detail, and an outsider learning them badly.
12 of 12recommended on 2 listsEnder's Game
Orson Scott Card
Its real subject is the same as Le Guin's: the catastrophe of meeting an intelligence you cannot read, and what you destroy while failing to understand it.
Start from one you already loved
A genre is a blunt instrument. Pick the mythology retellings book you actually liked and we’ll rank the next one by what you liked about it.
- Books like The Bear and the NightingaleKatherine Arden
- Books like The Golem and the JinniHelene Wecker
- Books like UprootedNaomi Novik
- Books like The Left Hand of DarknessUrsula K. Le Guin
- Books like Snow CrashNeal Stephenson
- Books like CirceMadeline Miller
- Books like City of BrassS. A. Chakraborty
- Books like The Song of AchillesMadeline Miller
- Books like Ella EnchantedGail Carson Levine
- Books like CinderMarissa Meyer
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