Books like The Song of Achilles

Circe is the obvious next read after The Song of Achilles, and for good reason. Miller brings the same luminous prose and emotional precision to the story of the witch-goddess daughter of Helios, exiled to the island of Aiaia after defying the gods. Like Patroclus, Circe is an outsider among immortals, someone who does not fit the mold her world demands.

The novel tracks her transformation from a dismissed, overlooked nymph into a figure of real power and self-possession. Where The Song of Achilles is a love story first and a war story second, Circe is a survival story that doubles as a meditation on what it means to find your own strength when everyone around you has already decided what you are. Both books share Miller's gift for making ancient characters feel like people you know, with all the mess and warmth that implies.

Readers who loved the emotional texture and mythological depth of The Song of Achilles will find Circe an equally satisfying, if tonally different, experience.

Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the captive queen whose body becomes a bargaining chip between Achilles and Agamemnon. Where Miller romanticizes Achilles, Barker strips him bare, showing the Trojan War through the eyes of women who had no say in any of it. The prose is blunt and modern where Miller's is lyrical, but both novels ask the same question: whose stories get told, and whose get erased?

Briseis watches the same events Patroclus does, but from a position of even less power. The result is a war novel that feels raw and urgent, a direct counterpoint to the heroic tradition. If The Song of Achilles made you fall in love with these characters, The Silence of the Girls will make you reckon with the cost of their glory.

It is the perfect companion piece, offering a perspective that is both complementary and challenging.

Jennifer Saint's Ariadne splits its narrative between two sisters from Greek myth: Ariadne, who helps Theseus kill the Minotaur only to be abandoned on Naxos, and Phaedra, whose fate is equally tangled with the whims of gods and heroes. Like The Song of Achilles, this novel centers the emotional lives of characters who exist at the margins of more famous stories.

Saint writes with a directness that grounds the mythological setting, making these ancient women feel immediate and real. The dual timeline structure keeps the pace moving, and the sisterly bond between Ariadne and Phaedra adds a dimension that differs from Miller's romantic focus while scratching the same itch.

Both novels share a preoccupation with fate, with how much agency any mortal has when gods are pulling the strings. Readers who loved The Song of Achilles for its emotional core and its fresh take on old stories will find Ariadne operating in the same space with a distinct voice.

Natalie Haynes tells the Trojan War entirely from the women's side in A Thousand Ships, cycling through voices that include Penelope, Hecuba, Cassandra, and the Muse Calliope herself. The structure is a mosaic: short chapters, each from a different woman's viewpoint, building a collective portrait of the war that traditional tellings ignore.

Where The Song of Achilles gives you one deep, sustained perspective, A Thousand Ships offers breadth, showing how the same catastrophe ripples outward to touch every woman connected to it. Haynes writes with wit and anger, and the cumulative effect is devastating.

The novel argues, forcefully and with plenty of dark humor, that the women of Troy had stories every bit as dramatic as the men's. If The Song of Achilles opened your appetite for myth retellings that reframe whose pain matters, A Thousand Ships takes that impulse and runs with it across an entire war.

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad is a sharp, sardonic retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope, Odysseus's wife who spent twenty years waiting for him to come home. Atwood gives Penelope a voice that is wry, intelligent, and deeply skeptical of the heroic narrative her husband built around himself. A chorus of her twelve hanged maids punctuates the story, demanding accountability for their deaths.

The novel is shorter and more pointed than The Song of Achilles, but it shares the same drive to rewrite mythology from an overlooked perspective. Where Miller's approach is tender and romantic, Atwood's is acidic and questioning. Both, though, refuse to let the original myths have the last word.

If you loved The Song of Achilles for the way it humanized figures trapped inside a story that was never written for them, The Penelopiad does the same thing with a sharper set of tools.

Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine is set during the Peloponnesian War and follows Alexias, a young Athenian who studies under Socrates and falls in love with a fellow student named Lysis. Published in 1956, the novel treats their relationship with a matter-of-factness that was radical for its time, and it remains one of the finest portrayals of queer love in a classical setting.

Like The Song of Achilles, the book places an intimate love story against the backdrop of a war that threatens to consume everything. Renault's prose is restrained and elegant, grounded in meticulous historical research that makes Athens feel lived-in rather than decorative.

The emotional stakes hit differently than Miller's lush romanticism, but the underlying concerns are the same: love as a form of resistance against a world that demands violence and sacrifice. Readers who want more historical fiction with queer protagonists in ancient settings will find Renault's work a revelation.

Genevieve Gornichec's The Witch's Heart takes Norse mythology and filters it through the perspective of Angrboda, the giantess who becomes Loki's lover and mother to three of the most feared creatures in the Norse pantheon. Like The Song of Achilles, this novel centers a figure who exists at the edges of a larger mythological cycle, someone whose story has always been told by others.

Angrboda's relationships with Loki, with her children, and with the other gods drive the narrative, and the tone shares Miller's blend of warmth and inevitable tragedy. Both novels know from page one that catastrophe is coming, and both use that foreknowledge to deepen the emotional impact of every quiet, domestic moment.

If you gravitated toward The Song of Achilles because it made mythology feel personal and specific, The Witch's Heart does the same thing with a different pantheon and an equally devastating ending.