Some books earn their staying power the loud way, with a splashy debut and a fading afterlife. “Circe,” Madeline Miller’s 2018 retelling of Greek mythology’s most famous witch, has done the opposite: nearly a decade after publication, it keeps climbing back onto sales charts, propelled now by a new generation of readers discovering it through BookTok and Bookstagram rather than the literary pages that first celebrated it.
Miller takes a minor figure from Homer’s “Odyssey,” the nymph who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, and gives her an entire life. Circe is born to the sun god Helios and a sea nymph mother, an awkward, overlooked child among the dazzling cruelty of the Titans and Olympians. When her fascination with mortals leads her to discover a power for transformation that the gods around her lack, she’s banished to the deserted island of Aiaia, where centuries unfold: encounters with Daedalus and the Minotaur, a fateful visit from a certain wandering Greek king, and a slow, hard-won reckoning with what it means to choose mortality, motherhood, and self-determination in a world built entirely around the whims of men and gods.
What makes “Circe” more than a clever mythological mashup is Miller’s control of voice. She writes in a controlled, incantatory first person that makes centuries of immortal boredom and grief feel as immediate as a single afternoon, and she’s unusually good at making the reader feel the specific humiliations of being a woman, even a divine one, in a world where power is inherited by sons and violence against daughters is treated as background noise. The novel’s midsection, when Circe finally masters witchcraft on her own terms, lands as a genuine feminist reclamation without ever feeling like a thesis statement grafted onto myth. Miller, a classicist by training, also has real fun updating figures like Daedalus, Medea, and Odysseus without flattening them into modern archetypes.
Critics were near-unanimous in their enthusiasm when the book debuted, praising Miller’s lyrical prose and her ability to make a two-thousand-year-old story feel newly urgent, and the novel went on to become a finalist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a fixture on best-of-the-decade lists. In the years since, its reputation has only grown, with readers frequently citing it as the book that got them into both mythology retellings and adult fantasy more broadly, a genre now crowded with imitators trying to replicate its particular alchemy of scholarship and heart.
Whether you come to it fresh off “The Song of Achilles” or as a newcomer to Miller’s take on the classics, “Circe” remains one of the most satisfying character studies in recent fiction, mythological or otherwise. It’s a reminder that the oldest stories still have room for someone who was never given the chance to tell her own.
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