Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has brought Homer’s ancient world back into the cultural spotlight. These five modern retellings reveal how Greek mythology continues to illuminate the questions, conflicts and anxieties of our own time.Few stories have travelled as far across time as the myths of ancient Greece. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, released in July, has returned Homer’s epic to popular consciousness — but its most interesting afterlife may be found in books that reimagine who gets to tell these stories. Modern retellings do more than just translate old legends into contemporary prose: they shift the lens, question inherited ideas of heroism, examine the mythic texture to find contemporary parallels, and bring figures once pushed to the margins into the foreground.In doing that, it makes them resonant now– when issues surrounding war, migration, gender, power, faith and belonging remain stubbornly persistent. From Trojan women left to bear the cost of a war fought by men, to a Muslim British family caught in the politics of citizenship and extremism, these novels use myth as a language for the present. If Nolan has sent readers back towards Homer, these books offer a more unruly route: through Penelope, Circe, Antigone, Psyche and the women whose stories are often left unfinished in epic tradition.Home Fire — Kamila Shamsie Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie. (Image generated using AI)Sophocles’ Antigone gets a sharply critical retelling in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. The novel follows Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz, three British Muslim siblings whose lives are transformed when Parvaiz, haunted by his father’s legacy, leaves London to join an extremist group. When he dies abroad, Aneeka turns to Eamonn, the son of Britain’s powerful home secretary, in an attempt to bring her brother’s body home. What follows is a collision between family loyalty, state power and citizenship. Shamsie makes Antigone’s ancient question — whose law deserves obedience? — feel immediate in a world shaped by Islamophobia, counterterrorism and contested belonging. It is a retelling about borders, both national and intimate.The Penelopiad — Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood. (Generated using AI)What if Penelope could finally tell her own story? In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood gives Odysseus’ wife the microphone from the afterlife, revisiting the twenty years she spent waiting for her husband to return from Troy. But Penelope is not alone: the twelve maids hanged by Telemachus after Odysseus’ homecoming form a classical Greek chorus– interrupting, contradicting and complicating her account. Their presence turns a familiar tale of faithful waiting into a darker meditation on class, gender and who is to be believed. Atwood’s Penelope is witty, self-aware and hardly interested in the saintly image posterity has made of her. The novel asks a question contemporary literature keeps returning to: what happens when women reclaim narratives built around men?Also Read | ‘Abysmal writing… I’d be ashamed’: Emily Wilson, whose Odyssey translation inspired Nolan, rips filmA Thousand Ships — Natalie Haynes A Thousand Ships — Natalie Haynes. (Generated using AI)The Trojan War looks different when the men are no longer the only protagonists. Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships gathers the stories of women and goddesses caught in the war and its aftermath: Andromache, Cassandra, Penelope, Helen, Clytemnestra, Briseis and many others, with the Muse Calliope providing a framing voice. The novel moves across perspectives, revealing what epic warfare looks like from the homes and ruins it leaves behind. Haynes, a classicist, turns the peripheral into the central: women become witnesses, survivors, and narrators rather than prizes or footnotes. In an age of wars still narrated through commanders and battle maps, its focus on civilian cost feels less like revision than correction.Story continues below this adTill We Have Faces — C S Lewis Till We Have Faces — C S Lewis. (Generated using AI)Long before the current boom in myth retellings, C S Lewis was reworking the story of Cupid and Psyche. Published in 1956, Till We Have Faces tells the myth through Orual, Psyche’s older sister, transforming a familiar tale of beauty, love and divine punishment into a psychologically complex reckoning with jealousy, grief and alternative perceptions. Set in the fictional kingdom of Glome, it follows Orual from princess to ruler as she struggles to understand what happened to Psyche — and whether the gods have wronged her or if she has misunderstood love itself.Circe — Madeline Miller Circe — Madeline Miller. (Generated using AI)In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe is the witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs. Madeline Miller asks what happens when that supposedly dangerous woman gets an entire life of her own. Circe traces the goddess’s childhood among the Titans, her exile to Aiaia, her discovery of witchcraft and her encounters with figures including Daedalus, Medea and Odysseus. Miller turns a brief episode in Homer into a sweeping story about power, isolation, motherhood, violence and self-determination. Crucially, Circe’s transformation is not simply from powerless to powerful; it is about learning what kind of power she wants. In a culture perpetually attentive to whose voices myths have historically privileged, Miller’s novel makes reclamation itself the story.(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)