Film adaptations usually send a trickle of readers back to the source. Nolan’s The Odyssey has sent a flood. The numbers are genuinely unusual: Emily Wilson’s translation has passed a million US copies and reached No. 2 on the overall bestseller list, while Publishers Weekly reported Robert Fagles’s rival translation up 93 per cent and Madeline Miller’s Circe up 128 per cent in the same week.
Which raises a practical question for anyone holding a ticket. The poem is long, the mythology is dense, and the film assumes a certain amount of knowledge. Here are ten books to read before Nolan’s The Odyssey, ordered by how much work each one actually does for you.
The Two Essentials Before Nolan’s The Odyssey
1. The Odyssey by Homer. Obviously. The only real decision is whose English you read it in, and that decision matters more than most people expect. Wilson’s 2017 version is fast, plain and metrically disciplined, which is why it has become the default. Fagles is more theatrical. Lattimore is the most literal. We have compared the major options in our guide to which translation of The Odyssey you should read, but if you want a one-line answer: start with Wilson. Do not be intimidated by the length. The poem moves, and roughly half of it is a man telling stories at a dinner party.
2. The Iliad by Homer. Not required, but it changes what the film is about. The Odyssey is a homecoming story, and homecomings only ache if you know what the soldier is coming home from. The Iliad is where Odysseus earns his reputation for cunning and where the war costs everyone everything. Read it afterwards if you are short on time. Read it first if you want Ithaca to hurt.
The Retellings That Reshape Nolan’s The Odyssey
3. Circe by Madeline Miller. The single most useful companion here. Miller takes the witch who turns Odysseus’s crew into pigs and gives her a life, a childhood, and a point of view. Odysseus appears as a guest, seen from outside, and the portrait is not flattering. After Circe, the hero looks different in every scene of the original, and the film’s version of him becomes far more interesting to argue about.
4. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Miller’s debut covers the Iliad’s territory through the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. It is the book that pulled a generation of readers into Greek myth in the first place, and its sales are up 82 per cent on the back of the film. As preparation it is indirect, but it establishes the emotional stakes of the war shadowing every page of the sequel.
5. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. Short, sharp and quietly furious, and the sharpest corrective to the version of events Nolan’s The Odyssey inherits. Atwood hands the story to Penelope and to the twelve enslaved maids Odysseus executes on his return, a scene most readers skate past. It takes an afternoon and permanently complicates the ending. If you read only one revisionist take, read this. Our older roundup of Homer retellings covers where it sits among the rest.
6. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes. Haynes retells the Trojan War entirely through its women, moving between Trojan captives, Greek wives, goddesses and Penelope herself, whose letters to an absent husband get funnier and angrier as the years pass. Useful precisely because it treats the ten-year journey home as an insult rather than an adventure.
7. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker. Barker gives the Iliad to Briseis, the captured queen who is the war’s opening argument. The harshest book on this list and the least interested in glory. Read it if you want the heroism in Nolan’s The Odyssey to feel properly expensive.
The Guides and Context for Nolan’s The Odyssey
8. Mythos by Stephen Fry. If the family trees defeat you, start here. Fry retells the Greek myths in order, with jokes, and by the end you will finally have the gods straight. His Odyssey and Troy volumes carry the same easy authority, and Heroes fills in the demigods around the edges. Not scholarship, and not trying to be. Excellent scaffolding. Start with Mythos.
9. Ithaca by Claire North. North stays home. Her Ithaca is a kingdom under twenty years of pressure with no king, narrated by Hera, and far more political than most retellings dare to be. The best preparation available for understanding why the second half of the poem is a story about property, succession and a woman holding a line.
10. Hera by Jennifer Saint. Saint has become the most prolific of the current mythology novelists, and Hera is her most ambitious book, following the queen of the gods across the whole sweep of Greek myth. Read it for the divine machinery humming behind Odysseus’s bad luck. Her This Immortal Heart is the natural follow-up.
If You Only Have One Weekend Before Nolan’s The Odyssey
Read Wilson’s Odyssey. That is it. Everything else on this list deepens the film, but only the poem is load-bearing.
If you have two weekends, add Circe. If you have three, add The Penelopiad, which is shorter than most people’s commute reading and reframes the entire ending.
A Word on Spoilers
There are none. The poem announces its own outcome in the first dozen lines, the way epics do, and Greek audiences knew the story before the performance started. Nolan is adapting a text whose ending has been public knowledge for roughly twenty-eight centuries. Read freely.
The Last Word on Reading Before Nolan’s The Odyssey
The pleasure of a moment like this is watching a very old book behave like a new release. A poem that survived on memory before it survived on paper is currently outselling most of the frontlist, and every one of these ten books exists because somebody could not stop arguing with it. Pick two, and Nolan’s The Odyssey becomes a conversation rather than a spectacle. If the mythology bug takes hold properly, our list of Greek mythology retellings like Circe and The Song of Achilles is where to go next.
