The best Iliad books

This is by all estimation the greatest of the sagas. I would even claim that its excellence allows it to be fairly mentioned in the same breath as the Iliad, Don Quixote, and the tragedies of Shakespeare. It is quite complex and I would suggest, if I am allowed to, my Why is Your Axe Bloody? (2014) as a guide. But the present Penguin translation is a travesty and should be avoided. The best English translation available is the older Penguin translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (1961) and still available from various used booksellers online. Their translation is as good as a translation can get. Hrafnkels saga is a perfect entry to the sagas because it is short and compact and prepares one for the complexity of Njáls saga. 

Any recommendation list of novels about Alexander must include Mary Renault, queen of Greek historical fiction. Fire from Heaven covers his childhood/youth and remains many readers’ initial introduction to him. Her knowledge of Greece, both the land and its history, is rich, and she was first to depict, in a positive way, Alexander’s relationship with Hephaistion as more than friendship. Ironically, the book’s publication coincided with the NYC Stonewall Riots in June of 1969. Yet however progressive her view of homoerotic attachments, she paints a troublingly misogynistic portrait of Alexander’s mother Olympias. The book contains a few errors as several critical archaeological discoveries were 10+ years in the future, but historical novelists can’t be faulted for forthcoming finds. Her second novel about Alexander, The Persian Boy, was published in 1972.

Logue’s modernist reworking of the Iliad – the Trojan war - mother of all Mediterranean contests, is quite unlike anything you’ll ever read. Logue doesn’t translate, he remakes. It’s as cinematic as a film script, cast in a poetic language as brilliant as anything in modern times, full of jump cuts, staccato effects, and startling contemporary references. The violence of the fighting has a slamming immediacy (‘Dust like red mist/Pain like chalk on slate’), the Mediterranean – ‘the sea that is always counting’ - glimmers and sighs, the Gods behave like spoiled children, helicopters go whumping over the dunes.

A masterpiece. Royall Tyler translates this tale, which had been recited orally by blind monks in the fourteenth century, into beautiful English; the rhythms of the language, its beauty, tragedy, and poetry become accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. One of the greatest accomplishments in translation and a must-read for all interested in medieval Japanese warfare and epic war tales.

Not a novel, but it reads like one, as Nicolson tells the story of how the greatest sea voyage tale of all time – The Odyssey, and its sister epic The Iliad – came to be, with a cast of characters including the Greek heroes, gods and goddesses crossing the land and seascapes of Ancient Greece. 

Nicolson argues that these poems emerged not in the 8th century BC, when they were first written down, but a thousand years earlier in the oral tradition. In them, he sees the origin myths of the people who became the Greeks – the fusion of the native people of the Eastern Mediterranean and invaders from the northern steppes. 

But it is Nicolson’s personal investment in his subject that is so beguiling. A sailor himself, he brings his deep knowledge of the sea, of sailing, navigation, the capriciousness of wind, the knife-edge between… show more.

While generally considered science fiction, this one of Tepper’s books is centred on a society where men and women live separately – and why, and the effects of such a divided society on the lives of men and women. Although the divided society in my book owes more to Sparta than Tepper’s book, she gave me the idea to examine the consequences of such a society in my pseudo-post-Roman world.

All adventures begin with The Odyssey.

Before there was Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, or Bilbo Baggins, there was brave Odysseus. It was Homer who first taught us what it means to desperately desire “to make it there and back again.” For me, The Odyssey struck a personal cord. As a warrior who once answered his nation’s call, it often wasn’t the battles in far distant lands, but the journey home, that was most difficult. Home, that beautiful, powerful word, holds great magic for Odysseus, and for me, too. Many ideas can send a hero on an adventure, but only love of home can bring him back again. These are the greatest adventures of all, and why The Odyssey is foundational for my own novel.

Why not start with the oldest surviving long-form narrative there is. While purporting to account for the late reign of the very real King of the very real Sumerian city-state Uruk, the epic of Gilgamesh—very like the epics that the Greeks would offer some 4 to 14 hundred years later—trots out a world replete with the goddesses, monsters, magical drums, forests, and sacred undersea plants. The flavor of this world is first and most memorably signaled by the deliberate creation of a rival for its protagonist. Sculpted from river clay, then sexually domesticated by a temple maiden, the wild man Enkidu fights his way into a lifelong bromance with Gilgamesh that eventually confronts each with his own mortality. Again, for being the oldest such tale we know of, and for having to be chiseled on tablets, the whole thing holds up as a very living document, wildly entertaining, psychologically… show more.

Kazantzakis is perhaps most famous for being excommunicated after he wrote The Last Temptation of Christ, but I think his best book is Freedom and Death. Freedom and Death was described as Kazantzakis’ “modern Iliad,” but it is more than a tale of heroes and war. It is about the struggle of the Cretan people for liberty and their desire to end the Ottoman occupation of their island at the end of the 19th century. In spite of the obvious morality of the cause of freedom, Kazantzakis paints a complex picture in which there are no obvious heroes and humanity’s faults are clearly visible. No character is more noble than the Turk, Nuri Bey. None more flawed than the novel’s Greek protagonist, Captain Michalis. Freedom and Death is also the powerful story of a man’s struggle against himself and the conflict between our personal interests and our… show more.

The Iliad is not a book on strategy. Nor on tactics, nor on logistics, nor on command and control, nor on any other individual aspect of warfare about which any number of lesser authors have written. An epic poem, it provides an unparalleled panorama of men (and, playing a secondary yet crucially important role, a few women) at war: the hope, the despair, the fear, the elation, the kindness, the rage, the horror, the love and the sex (which both increases the horror and to some extent makes up for it). All intertwined, and all pulsating along with the human heart. Probably written down around 750 BCE, but making use of much older material, for almost three millennia now it has been regarded not just as a classic but as the greatest classic of all. Unquestionably it will continue doing so for millennia more. 

Don't look for some high-brow version full of pseudo-Shakespearean language. Homer's story is a blood-and-guts tale (literally) of hard-bitten heroes, feuding among spiteful gods and bombastic military commanders. Try John Dolan's version from Feral house publishing, deliberately written as he imagined the story was first told – by soldiers sitting around a campfire exchanging yarns.

Wrath Goddess Sing reimagines Achilles as a trans woman and rewrites her journey through the myths of the Iliad. It’s the debut novel of trans author Maya Deane.

Achilles takes several lovers, but this book is not an Achilles/Patroclus shipping vehicle, so don’t go in with that expectation. She’s delightfully complicated: brave, of course, and passionate, but also prickly at times, and hard to love. Her story casts Helen in a villainous, active role for once, and also considers how the gods function beyond Greek society; it feels extremely dense and well-researched, with a diverse cast of characters. There’s some controversy about the book, but I urge you to make up your own mind, and to reflect on the historical context that Deane is drawing upon.

An interpretation of part of The Iliad where King Priam journeys to Achilles' camp to beg for the return of his son Hector's body. Malouf gives us access to Priam's thoughts and feelings as he dresses as a carter and drives straight into the enemy camp, wondering at all the things that, as a king, he has never noticed before. Once in the camp, he must face the man who has been dragging his son's body behind his chariot day after day, only to wake up each morning and find it magically restored. This is a story about those who are left behind, told in heart-stoppingly beautiful writing. 

If you’re like me and love gangster stories, you’re going to love this book. The characters draw you into their world, their backgrounds, and their unique personalities from the beginning. I found myself comparing them to childhood friends since I grew up around similar characters. Maybe you did too. You’ll root for Danny as he navigates through the crime bosses, crooked cops, and his own gang of allies. Will he succeed or become another crime boss?

This is another of my go-to books in time of trouble.

Writing in 1871-72, Eliot goes back to the Midlands of her youth at the time of the Reform Act, 1832. So far, so dry as dust, I you say. But Eliot writes so well, creates such wonderful characters and deals with problems that still vex us today, not least the speed of change when you’d rather things stayed the same. But no one could not love the idealistic Dorothea, the frustrated Dr. Lydgate and the poet Will Ladislaw who becomes a great social reformer.

It’s one of the longest novels in the English language, but I’m always so distressed when I have finished it and have to say goodbye to the characters I’ve come to know so intimately.

These are epic poems that have been presented in the courts and amphitheaters from ancient Greece into the modern era. I first read The Iliad as a high-school summer-reading assignment. Later in college, I read The Odyssey for personal entertainment.

The Iliad begins during the siege of Troy (c.1200 BCE) and describes the personality conflicts among the Achaean besiegers as well as detailed descriptions of army and personal combat in this era. The Odyssey is the story of the return of the King of Ithaca and his retinue from the war. They inadvertently offend Poseidon which results in ten additional years of misadventures. By the time Odysseus returns to Ithaca, he is alone and he must reclaim his wife and his throne alone.

I first undertook to read these epic poems because they play such a huge role in Western culture but as I read them, I became fascinated by… show more.

Hand of Fire was one of the first books to truly win me over on Achilles as a real hero worthy of romanticism and admiration. Starkston’s exploration of Briseis’s character and her relationship to and with Achilles is so well-wrought, pulling both from the Hittites (the empire in which Briseis was born) and the Greek mythology and archeology. The way she weaves the two cultures together to create this story, priming Briseis for Achilles’s arrival to create a narrative that gives Briseis both power and agency is absolutely masterful. I loved that Starkston didn’t shy away from the supernatural hallmarks of the Iliad, either, allowing the gods and their direct influence to breathe inside her retelling of the Trojan War.

This book technically isn’t about the Iraq war but instead, about violence more broadly and it's super nerdy but super important.

As a soldier and sociologist, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways academia deals with questions of violence. In particular, since the popularity of moral psychology theories like Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory (popularized in his book The Righteous Mind), the running assumption in a lot of academic circles is that harm = bad. But Fisk and Rai show that violence serves social purpose such as bonding people together or teaching them group boundaries.

It’s a difficult read because it challenges people’s assumptions about violence and harm but that makes it all the more important in understanding how people come home from war and the ways in which they wrestle with actions they’ve done. 

Homer’s Iliad is a fabulously exciting tale of action and heroism, as the mightiest Greek heroes fight beneath the walls of Troy for the most beautiful woman who ever lived. But there is so much more to it! It’s partly the tale of one man’s anger, and partly a timeless tale about war and sacrifice for all humanity. Homer confronts some of the most significant human problems with amazingly contemporary power and nuance: the beauty and horror of combat; the inseparability of glory and destruction; the raw emotional power of reconciliation between mortal enemies; and the fact that there is more to life than revenge and more to being a man than slaughtering other men. Richmond Lattimore’s inspired translation makes you feel like Homer himself is reciting the tales to you.

The story of Briseis, Achilles' prize that he was forced to give up to Agamemnon, is an eye-opening account of what happened to women at the time of the Trojan War. Their male relatives were slain and they were assigned as booty, spoils of war. Achilles, who was famously paired with Patroclus, is given depth of character here as is the long wait to attack Troy. Once again, the reader is transported to another world and that world becomes real. Barker's description of Achilles' relationship with his mother is another twist in the story and one for which there is a very funny line partway through the book. But in this book, the real hero is Briseis. I loved the imagination that Barker brought to this story.