Madeline Miller Books

Madeline Miller was born in 1978, grew up in New York City and Philadelphia, and took both a bachelor's and master's degree in classics at Brown University. For more than a decade she taught Latin and Greek to high school students, and the whole time she was privately rewriting Homer. The Song of Achilles took her ten years, was published in 2011, and won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012. Not bad for a debut about a three-thousand-year-old spoiler. It has since become one of those rare books that gets handed between friends with the phrase 'I need you to suffer too.'

The Song of Achilles retells the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus, an awkward exiled prince who grows up beside golden, terrifying Achilles, trains with him under the centaur Chiron, and follows him to Troy knowing exactly how prophecies about Achilles end. The love story between the two men is tender, physical, and doomed in the way only Greek material can manage, since the audience has known the ending for three millennia and Miller weaponises that knowledge on every page. The final chapters are among the most cried-over in modern fiction, and that is a measurable BookTok phenomenon, not a figure of speech.

Circe (2018) is the bigger, and arguably better, book. It hands the microphone to the witch of Aiaia, a minor goddess exiled to an island, and builds her an entire life: the theft of fire, the creation of the monster Scylla out of jealousy, encounters with Daedalus and the Minotaur, the famous season with Odysseus, and a long, hard-won education in what mortals are worth. It sat at the top of the New York Times list, and its television adaptation was announced for HBO Max and has since gone very quiet, which happens. Circe herself, rageful and self-possessed, has become a template for a generation of goddess-and-mortal retellings.

Then came the strange second act: TikTok resurrected her. During 2021, a decade after publication, The Song of Achilles was selling multiples of its original launch numbers, driven by crying videos and a certain melancholy song about Achilles standing on a wall. Miller herself has been open about her health in these years, describing a long struggle with long covid that badly slowed her writing. Her published output since Circe has been small and deliberate: the short story Galatea in a standalone edition, another short piece, Mestra, and the confirmed news that she is at work on a novel about Persephone. No reliable date exists, and after two ten-year books, nobody serious is holding her to one.

What defines Miller is mythic material written with complete emotional directness. The gods are glittering narcissists, the mortals are the moral centre, and the prose is dense but never slow. On heat she is a 1 to 2 on our scale: sex happens, briefly and beautifully, and then the emotional consequences take over for fifty pages, which is the correct ratio for what she is doing. If your shelf includes Neon Gods, Lore Olympus, or any godly romance published in the last five years, you are already reading her descendants, and the original is better.

Where to start: this is the rare author where either flagship works. The Song of Achilles if you want to be destroyed, Circe if you want to be reassembled, and the honest answer is both, in that order, with recovery time in between. Keep tissues within reach, do not read the last fifty pages of Achilles in public, and join the rest of us in waiting, patiently and without pestering her, for Persephone to descend.