Circe

Circe is a mythic fantasy novel by the American writer Madeline Miller, published in 2018. It is set during the Greek Heroic Age and reimagines a range of Greek myths, most notably the Odyssey, from the perspective of the witch Circe. Miller invents or substantially reinterprets much of Circe's biography, including her encounters with Hermes, the Minotaur, Jason and Medea, and the affairs she has with both Odysseus and his son Telemachus, which departs substantially from the surviving versions of the story.

The titan Helios is her father and the naiad Perse her mother, which makes Circe a goddess by birth, though by the standards of the gods she is nothing much: no particular power, a voice that sounds like a mortal's, and no interest in divine politics. Her father pays her no attention, and the rest of her family treats her badly. As a child she sees Prometheus, chained and tortured for the gift of fire he gave humankind, and slips him nectar while nobody is watching; it is the first act of hers that could be held against her.

When she uses the magic she has discovered to punish a rival, Zeus exiles her to a deserted island, which she turns into a home over centuries of practising herbs and spells. The men who arrive there are mostly trouble, and turning some of them into pigs is the part of her story everyone already knows. She is still on the island when the mortal she has come to love needs her to choose between the gods she is born from and the life she could have.

Miller writes the novel in Circe's own voice across a span of centuries, so the myths are seen from the position of someone who lives through them rather than someone told about them. It is a standalone novel, and it is one of the books that brought the retelling of Greek myth into the mainstream, though its treatment of the myths is more interested in the gaps than in the familiar episodes.