Classics · Similar reads
Books like The Odyssey
The best books like The Odyssey are Circe, The Song of Achilles, and Ulysses. The Odyssey by Homer is about homecoming, the hero's journey, cunning and wit. If that's what drew you in, here are 12 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.
- Circe
01
Madeline Miller · Fantasy
Circe is the daughter of Helios, god of the sun, but she inherits neither divine radiance nor power — only a human voice that embarrasses her immortal family.
Madeline Miller hands the mic to the witch who kept Odysseus on her island for a year. The Odyssey's most famous episode, retold as a goddess's whole life.
Read the summary → - The Song of Achilles
02
Madeline Miller · Historical fiction
The Song of Achilles retells the story of the Trojan War through the eyes of Patroclus, a clumsy and unexceptional prince who is exiled in childhood and sent to be raised alongside Achilles at Peleus's court.
Miller's other myth: the love story behind the Trojan War that Odysseus is sailing home from. Read it and the ten-year voyage has a whole tragedy behind it.
Read the summary → - Ulysses
03
James Joyce · Literary fiction
Ulysses takes place on a single day — June 16, 1904 — in Dublin, following three characters: Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser; his wife Molly; and Stephen Dedalus, the young writer from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Joyce maps a single Dublin day onto Homer's poem, episode for episode. The Odyssey is the key that unlocks the 20th century's most ambitious novel.
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- The Lord of the Rings
04
J.R.R. Tolkien · Philosophy
The Lord of the Rings is a single novel published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.
The great modern journey-and-return: a long, perilous road home through monsters and temptation, ending — like the Odyssey — in a fight to reclaim a homeland.
Read the summary → - The Hobbit
05
J.R.R. Tolkien · Fantasy
Bilbo Baggins is a thoroughly respectable hobbit who has no interest in adventures, danger, or anything that might interfere with his meals.
'There and back again' is the Odyssey in miniature: a reluctant traveler, a road full of hazards, and the quiet ache of coming home changed by the going.
Read the summary → - The Alchemist
06
Paulo Coelho · Religion & Spirituality
The Alchemist is a Brazilian novel first published in 1988 and translated into 80 languages, making it one of the most translated books in history.
The journey story stripped to a parable. Like Odysseus, Santiago crosses a world of trials only to learn the real treasure is bound up with home.
Read the summary → - Life of Pi
07
Yann Martel · Literary fiction
Life of Pi opens in Pondicherry, India, where Pi Patel grows up as the son of a zookeeper, accumulating an unorthodox religious education — he practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam simultaneously, to the bafflement of the adults around him.
A lone survivor adrift at sea, beset by a monster and kept alive by storytelling — the Odyssey's wanderings recast as one boy's impossible voyage.
Read the summary → - American Gods
08
Neil Gaiman · Fantasy
American Gods opens with Shadow Moon, a man released from prison days early because his wife has died in a car accident.
Gaiman sends the old gods on a road trip across America. If you love the Odyssey's world of meddling deities walking among mortals, this is its modern heir.
Read the summary → - Piranesi
09
Susanna Clarke · Fantasy
Piranesi is structured as the journal of a man who calls himself Piranesi, living in a House that contains the world: a vast and apparently infinite series of halls filled with marble statues, where the tides come in twice a day and the skies are visible through the upper floors.
A man lost in an endless labyrinth, piecing together who he is and how to get home. A strange, haunting odyssey of memory and return.
Read the summary → - The Name of the Wind
10
Patrick Rothfuss · Fantasy
The Name of the Wind is the first volume of the Kingkiller Chronicle, told as the oral history of Kvothe — a figure of such mythological status that stories about him have become wildly contradictory and probably false.
A wanderer sits down and narrates the epic of his own travels — the Odyssey's story-within-a-story structure spun into a spellbinding fantasy.
Read the summary → - The Silmarillion
11
J.R.R. Tolkien · Fantasy
The Silmarillion is Tolkien's attempt to do for English literature what the Norse Eddas and Finnish Kalevala did for their cultures: create a complete mythology from scratch.
For the deep mythic register: gods, heroes, doomed voyages, and the making of a world. Tolkien writing his own Homer.
Read the summary → - The Poppy War
12
R.F. Kuang · Fantasy
Rin is a war orphan from a poor southern province who claws her way into Sinegard, the empire's elite military academy, by acing an exam she was never supposed to pass.
War, vengeful gods, and a mortal pulled into the machinery of the divine. Kuang's epic shares the Odyssey's brutal sense that the gods are real and rarely kind.
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Books like The Odyssey: quick answers
What are the best books like The Odyssey?
The best books like The Odyssey by Homer are Circe by Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with The Odyssey, such as homecoming, the hero's journey, cunning and wit.
What should I read after The Odyssey?
A natural next read after The Odyssey is Circe by Madeline Miller. Madeline Miller hands the mic to the witch who kept Odysseus on her island for a year. The Odyssey's most famous episode, retold as a goddess's whole life. Other strong choices are The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
What books are similar to The Odyssey by Homer?
The Odyssey centers on homecoming, the hero's journey, cunning and wit. Books with a similar feel include Circe by Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
