Books Like The Odyssey
by Homer
The Odyssey is defined by a layered, episodic voyage home: a hero of guile and speech (Odysseus) navigates island-by-island trials, divine interventions and shifting narratives about identity and hospitality. Its structure is not a single linear plot so much as a string of set-piece encounters — cyclopes, sirens, witchcraft, suitors — each testing a virtue (cleverness, restraint, loyalty) while the poem repeatedly frames events through oral formulas, speeches and embedded tales.
Readers come to the Odyssey for different, very specific reasons. Some love the sea-road map of adventures and the variety of mythical locales; others are hooked by Odysseus’s strategic deception and verbal virtuosity; some respond to the poem’s meditation on nostos (return) and the costs of fame, or to the perspectives it gives women, slaves and gods through narrative digressions. The picks below are chosen so you can match the facet you loved — voyage-epics, mythic patchworks, intimate retellings, or modern structural experiments that riff on Homeric techniques.
Recommended for fans of The Odyssey
The Iliad
Homer
Companion epic centered on gods, heroism, and the Trojan War's tragic sweep.
Pick this if you want the immediate mythic context and the battlefield counterpart to Odysseus’s wanderings — the Iliad supplies the Trojan War events the Odyssey presumes.
The Aeneid
Virgil
Roman epic about a long, fated voyage and founding a new homeland.
Pick this if you care about a long, destiny-driven journey that links personal fate with the founding of a people — this Roman epic reframes voyage motifs into a national origin story.
Circe
Madeline Miller
Sympathetic myth retelling focusing on a woman entwined with gods and exile.
Pick this if you wanted to hear a formerly sidelined figure from the Odyssey tell her own story. This gives Circe a full interior life and reframes her encounters with Odysseus and the gods.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Zachary Mason
Inventive, fragmented reworkings that echo and invert Homeric episodes.
Pick this if you want inventive rewrites that fragment and invert Odyssean episodes. These are playful thought experiments on Homeric motifs rather than straight retellings.
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Mythic patchwork of transformation tales starring gods and mortals intertwining.
Pick this if you loved the poem’s catalogue of divine meddling and metamorphosis. This is a patchwork of myths where gods and mortals repeatedly change form and fortune.
The Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood
Penelope's ironic, elegiac retelling of the Odyssey's aftermath and female voice.
Pick this if you were most moved by the homecoming and the wives’ stakes. This retelling centers Penelope and offers an ironic, elegiac counter-narrative to the Homeric account.
The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Emotional, intimate reimagining of Homeric heroism and tragic love.
Pick this if you enjoyed Homeric heroism but wished for emotional interiority and personal relationships at the poem’s core. This is a close, affective re-vision of Greek heroic life.
Ulysses
James Joyce
Modernist reworking of Odyssean structure across a single day in Dublin.
Pick this if you want a radical formal experiment that transposes Odyssean patterns into a single contemporary urban day. It’s structurally homologous but linguistically and culturally extreme.
Argonautica
Apollonius of Rhodes
Another Greek voyage epic full of quests, gods, and perilous seafaring.
Pick this if the seafaring quest and ensemble of helpers and antagonists is what drew you. This is another Hellenistic voyage epic with the same quest-and-peril mechanics.
At a glance
Matches were chosen by specific Homeric elements: episodic voyage structure, divine or supernatural agency, focus on homecoming and identity, and the poem’s openness to retelling — whether classical, modernist or revisionist.
| Book | First published | Pages | Closest match on | Match |
|---|---|---|---|---|
The Iliad Homer | 1946 | 564 | Homeric companion epic | 95% |
The Aeneid Virgil | 1990 | — | Fated voyage & destiny | 90% |
Circe Madeline Miller | 2018 | 404 | Feminist myth retelling | 88% |
The Lost Books of the Odyssey Zachary Mason | 2008 | 234 | Fragmented Homeric play | 86% |
Metamorphoses Ovid | 1479 | 394 | Mythic transformation tales | 85% |
The Penelopiad Margaret Atwood | 2005 | 191 | Penelope’s viewpoint | 83% |
The Song of Achilles Madeline Miller | 2011 | 385 | Intimate heroic reimagining | 82% |
Ulysses James Joyce | 1914 | 736 | Modernist structural echo | 80% |
Argonautica Apollonius of Rhodes | 2024 | — | Another Greek voyage | 78% |
About The Odyssey
The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic poem traditionally attributed to Homer and thought to have reached its present form in the 8th century BCE. It survives as part of the oral-derived epic tradition and, together with the Iliad, forms the cornerstone of the Western epic canon and Greek ideas about nostos and kleos.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between The Odyssey and The Iliad?+
The Iliad focuses on the rage and battlefield events of the Trojan War; the Odyssey follows the long, episodic return of one hero after that war. For more of Homer’s voice and the war’s context, read The Iliad (id 1).
Which of these is a direct mythic sequel or companion?+
The Iliad is the direct companion epic that precedes the Odyssey in subject matter and tradition (id 1). Many later works on this list either retell Homeric episodes (ids 5, 6, 7, 9) or echo the voyage form (ids 2, 8).
I loved the Odyssey’s island episodes — what should I read next?+
For more episodic mythic adventures, try Argonautica (id 8) for a different Greek voyage with gods and perils, or Metamorphoses (id 3) for a sequence of transformation tales with the same mythic register.
Are there contemporary books that retell Odyssean material from other points of view?+
Yes. Circe (id 5) and The Penelopiad (id 6) retell parts of the Odyssey from women's perspectives, while The Lost Books of the Odyssey (id 9) offers fragmented, inventive reworkings of Homeric episodes.
Is Ulysses a translation or adaptation of the Odyssey?+
Ulysses (id 4) is a modernist reworking that maps Odyssey episodes and character patterns onto a single day in Dublin; it’s an experimental, highly allusive restaging rather than a literal retelling.
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