Best Fantasy Mythology Retellings

Gaiman's masterpiece: the old gods — Anansi, Odin, Czernobog — have come to America with the immigrants who believed in them, and they are dying, diminished, forgotten. Shadow Moon is released from prison and hired by a man called Wednesday — who is not what he seems — to help rally the old gods against something new. American Gods is about what America does to belief, about identity, about what survives translation. One of the most important fantasy novels of the 21st century.

Miller retells the Iliad from the perspective of Patroclus — Achilles' companion, his lover, the man whose death sets the final act in motion. The Song of Achilles is mythology retelling at its most emotionally direct: Miller takes the bones of a story everyone knows and makes them hurt again. Achilles is vain, golden, impossible, and completely convincing. Patroclus's love for him is the novel's engine and its tragedy. One of the finest literary fantasy novels of the decade.

Miller's second novel is even better than her first: Circe, the witch of Aiaia, given a full interiority and a story of her own. Miller takes the background character from The Odyssey and asks: what was it actually like? What did she want? The novel spans millennia of mythology — Daedalus and Icarus, the Minotaur, Scylla, Odysseus himself — and makes all of it feel fresh and vital. The finest mythology retelling novel written in English.

Gaiman retells the Norse myths in his own prose — clean, accessible, funny when the myths are funny, brutal when they are brutal. Norse Mythology is the ideal entry point for readers who want to understand the source material behind so much modern fantasy. From Yggdrasil and the nine worlds to the death of Baldr to Ragnarok, Gaiman gives every story its own voice without sacrificing the strangeness that makes Norse mythology so rich. Essential companion reading for anyone interested in mythology-based fantasy.

Arden's Winternight Trilogy draws on Russian folklore — domovoi, vazila, the chyert, and the legendary Morozko himself — and makes it feel as vivid and strange as it must have been before modernity arrived. Vasya is a girl in a medieval Russian village who can see the spirits that others have stopped believing in. The Bear and the Nightingale is one of the most beautifully written fantasy novels of recent years. For readers who want mythology that comes from outside the Greco-Roman tradition.

Ishiguro's only fantasy novel is a Booker Prize-winning author taking Arthurian mythology and asking what it means to forget. An elderly couple journey through post-Roman Britain where a mist has stolen everyone's memories. The giant of the title is the enormous thing that no one can quite remember. The Buried Giant is mythology fantasy as literary fiction at its most profound — slow, quiet, devastating. For readers who want mythology that operates at the level of metaphor.

Haynes retells the Trojan War from the perspectives of the women who experienced it — on both sides, across generations. A Thousand Ships gives voice to Penelope waiting, Cassandra prophesying, Hecuba grieving, Calliope narrating. Haynes writes with a classicist's knowledge and a novelist's anger — the rage at a war epic that placed women at the periphery of a story where they bore most of the cost. For readers who want mythology retelling with genuine feminist intelligence.

Kuang draws on Chinese history and mythology — shamanism, the Nian beast, the gods of the Chinese pantheon — to tell a story about a gifted girl who tests into an elite military academy and discovers that war is nothing like what she imagined. The Poppy War is mythologically rich and historically brutal: the novel's central atrocity is based on the Nanjing Massacre. For readers who want mythology fantasy rooted in a non-Western tradition, told with maximum honesty about what war actually does.