Books to Read After Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey

Quick answer: Start with a translation — Emily Wilson (2017) if you want verse that runs line-for-line with the Greek, E. V. Rieu’s 1946 Penguin prose if you’d rather just read the story. Then, for novels, know this before you buy: about half the famous “Greek retellings” are Trojan War books, not Odyssey books. The Song of Achilles and The Silence of the Girls end at Troy. Below, the two are kept firmly apart.

No spoilers for the film beyond its opening premise.

Nolan’s The Odyssey opened on 17 July 2026 — 173 minutes, shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema and scored by Ludwig Göransson. It opens with the Trojan Horse and then follows the journey home.

That last part matters for a reading list, because the poem it’s adapting is a homecoming story, and a lot of the fiction sold alongside it isn’t. So this list is split by what each book is actually about.

Start with the poem

There’s no single best translation; there’s a best one for what you want out of it.

E. V. Rieu · 1946 · Penguin Books · prose The gentlest way in, and a piece of publishing history: it was Penguin Classics no. 1, the book that launched the series Rieu founded and edited. It reads in chapters and paragraphs rather than verse lines. One thing to check on the copyright page — the Penguin text in shops today is Rieu’s 1946 translation as revised by his son, D. C. H. Rieu.

Robert Fitzgerald · 1961 · Doubleday, now Picador · verse A poet’s Odyssey rather than a line-for-line crib, and it won the Bollingen Prize for Translation in 1961. Picador’s own copy calls it “supple, conversational” and the standard version for three generations — that’s the publisher talking, but it points at the right thing: this one is built to be read, not collated.

Richmond Lattimore · 1965 · Harper & Row · verse Note the title is The Odyssey of Homer. A loose six-beat line answering the Greek hexameter, generally faithful line-for-line, and it keeps most of the Homeric epithets. Long the default text in undergraduate classics courses. The critic D. S. Carne-Ross attacked it over specific passages and the epithets Lattimore does drop.

Robert Fagles · 1996 · Viking, later Penguin Classics · verse Unrhymed and metrically irregular — typically around six beats, ranging from about four to eight. Freer with imagery than a crib would allow; the New York Times noted he wasn’t “exactingly literal.” Watch the year: Fagles’s Iliad is 1990 and his Odyssey is 1996, and they get swapped constantly.

Stanley Lombardo · 2000 · Hackett · verse Titled simply Odyssey. Short-lined and colloquial, built to be read aloud.

Emily Wilson · 2017 · W. W. Norton · verse In iambic pentameter, and kept to the same number of lines as the Greek, so it runs line-for-line against the original. Wilson renders the enslaved women of the household as “slaves” rather than “maids” — a choice that drew a great deal of comment. It is the first complete published English verse translation of the poem by a woman. (A Folio Society illustrated edition appeared in May 2026; that’s a new edition of this translation, not a new one.)

Peter Green · 2018 hardcover, 2019 paperback · University of California Press · verse Line-for-line in a long hexameter-ish line, with an introduction, maps, book-by-book summaries and notes. Critics split on the line itself: the Bryn Mawr Classical Review called it “a lumbering sometimes-hexameter line,” while Library Journal found it “flexible, colloquial.” Both are quoted here deliberately — pick by which you’d rather have.

Daniel Mendelsohn · first published 2025, University of Chicago Press · verse The newest of these. Mendelsohn works in a deliberately long six-beat line, and his reasoning is worth quoting because it explains the whole design: “Homer’s line is very, very long. Most English translations use iambic pentameter, or ‘blank verse,’ which is about half the length of the ancient Greek line.” Do not let anyone tell you this is a 2026 translation — that date belongs to the Penguin Classics UK edition, published in April 2026.

Books that follow Odysseus home

These genuinely engage the Odyssey: Ithaca, the household, the return.

The Penelopiad — Margaret Atwood Odyssey-side · POV: Penelope · 2005 · Canongate Penelope narrates from Hades, with a chorus of the twelve hanged maids answering her. Short, and the most direct counter-reading of the poem’s ending on this list.

The Lost Books of the Odyssey — Zachary Mason Odyssey-side · POV: mostly Odysseus · 2007; revised edition 2010 · Starcherone; FSG Forty-four short chapters that contradict each other on purpose. Worth being precise about what it is: these are invented apocrypha, not recovered material — a fiction about variant traditions rather than a reconstruction of any.

Circe — Madeline Miller Odyssey-side, with reservations · POV: Circe · 2018 · Little, Brown Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2019. Here’s the caveat, because plenty of lists skip it: Circe is Circe’s whole life, not a retelling of the homecoming. Odysseus is one long central episode; the book also ranges across Prometheus, the Minotaur, Daedalus, and Jason and Medea, and carries on into Telemachus and Telegonus — material from after the Odyssey ends. Read it as a novel that passes through the poem, not one that retells it.

Ithaca (2022), House of Odysseus (2023), The Last Song of Penelope (2024) — Claire North Odyssey-side · POV: Hera, then Aphrodite, then Athena · Orbit (UK) / Redhook (US) One goddess narrates each volume. The trilogy stays on Ithaca and with Penelope governing it — picking up in year seventeen of the twenty-year absence, not at the start. If the film’s Ithaca strand is what gripped you, this is the longest sustained treatment of that material in recent fiction.

Books about the war, not the homecoming — read these next, not first

All of these are good. None of them is an Odyssey book, and each entry says why.

The Song of Achilles — Madeline Miller Trojan-War-side · POV: Patroclus · 2011 · Bloomsbury The single most common false positive on lists like this one. It’s Achilles and Patroclus, and it ends at Troy — before the Odyssey begins.

For the Most Beautiful — Emily Hauser Trojan-War-side · POV: Krisayis and Briseis · 2016 · Transworld/Doubleday Iliad material, told by two women inside it. Not the homecoming.

The Silence of the Girls (2018), The Women of Troy (2021), The Voyage Home (2024) — Pat Barker Trojan-War-side · POV: Briseis; then Ritsa · Hamish Hamilton The first is pure Iliad, ending at Troy; the second is the immediate aftermath of the city’s fall. The third is the interesting one for this list: The Voyage Home is a homecoming story — but it is Agamemnon’s return to Mycenae, not Odysseus’s to Ithaca.

A Thousand Ships — Natalie Haynes Mostly Trojan-War-side · POV: the muse Calliope framing a chorus of women · 2019 · Picador The closest of these to crossing over: among its voices is a recurring strand of letters from Penelope to Odysseus, tracking his wanderings from Ithaca. The bulk of the book is still Troy and its aftermath.

Clytemnestra — Costanza Casati Trojan-War-side / House of Atreus · POV: Clytemnestra · 2023 · Michael Joseph Mycenae, Agamemnon and Iphigenia. Relevant obliquely: the Odyssey itself keeps invoking Agamemnon’s murder at home as the dark mirror of Odysseus’s return. But the novel is not about Ithaca.

Stone Blind — Natalie Haynes Not Odyssey-side · POV: Medusa, with Athene and Perseus · 2022 · Mantle Medusa and Perseus. No connection to the Odyssey beyond a shared pantheon — it’s here only because it’s shelved next to the others.

Lavinia — Ursula K. Le Guin Aeneid-side · POV: Lavinia · 2008 · Harcourt Roman epic, not Greek: Lavinia, silent in Virgil, in conversation with the dying poet’s shade.

If you’d rather read about the poem

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic — Daniel Mendelsohn · 2017 · Knopf Memoir and close reading at once: Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father sits in on his undergraduate Odyssey seminar, and the two later retrace the route by sea. If the film’s father-and-son thread is what stayed with you, start here.

The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey — Edith Hall · 2008 · Johns Hopkins University Press The one academic book on this list aimed squarely at this poem — how the Odyssey and Odysseus have been reworked across literature, drama and culture ever since.

Homer: A Very Short Introduction — Barbara Graziosi · 2019 · Oxford University Press Around 120 pages, with three chapters each on the Iliad and the Odyssey plus oral poetry and the textual evidence. The efficient bridge if you want context without a commitment.

Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”: A Biography — Alberto Manguel · first published 2007–08; revised and expanded edition 2024, Yale University Press A reception history — how the poems have been read down the centuries. Not a guide to reading them.

The Singer of Tales — Albert B. Lord · 1960 · Harvard University Press The foundational statement of oral-formulaic theory, built on fieldwork with South Slavic singers. It’s the book behind the idea that Homer’s epithets are the machinery of oral composition. Genuinely scholarly.

Why Homer Matters — Adam Nicolson · 2014 · Henry Holt (UK title: The Mighty Dead) Nicolson argues that the Iliad preserves memories of a much older world, dating the material far earlier than most scholars accept. Worth reading, but read it knowing it is not the consensus position — the Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s reviewer was not persuaded. Also note it is Iliad-weighted.

Homer and His Iliad — Robin Lane Fox · 2023 · Basic Books / Allen Lane A historian’s case for a specific time, place and method of composition. As the title says, it is not an Odyssey book.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed — Eric H. Cline · 2014; revised 2021 · Princeton University Press Late Bronze Age archaeology and the systems collapse around 1200 BC. Neither poem — and worth saying plainly, it is not evidence that the Trojan War happened as narrated.

Penelope’s Bones — Emily Hauser · 2025 · University of Chicago Press Archaeology, DNA and material evidence for the real Bronze Age women behind Homer’s female characters.

A little more about the film’s shape

One thing worth heading off, because it’s an easy thing to say and it isn’t true: the film gives Penelope and Telemachus a great deal of screen time, but that isn’t a correction of Homer. The poem’s first four books are the Telemachy, and Penelope is central to the original. What the film does is sustain the weight the poem already gives the Ithaca strand.

Nolan is reported to have consulted translations including Wilson, Rieu and Fagles. That’s as far as the reporting goes — we’ve seen nothing supporting the stronger claim that the film is based on any particular edition.

Where to start, in one line each

• Never read it → Rieu’s prose, or Wilson’s verse if you want the poetry.
• Read it years ago → Wilson or Mendelsohn, for how different it sounds now.
• Loved the Ithaca strand → Claire North’s trilogy, then The Penelopiad.
• Loved the gods → Circe, with the caveat above.
• Want the father-and-son thread → Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey.
• Want the history → Graziosi first, then Hall.

We haven’t linked anywhere to buy these. Publisher pages carry the current editions and ISBNs, and your local library almost certainly has most of them.

More on the film: our cast, plot and ending guide, what Nolan changed from Homer, and where to see it in IMAX 70mm.