Circe
core novel 2018 The Song of Achilles and Circe
Record
| First published | 2018 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.22 (1,472,338 ratings, collected 2026-09-14) |
| Page count | 393 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780316556347 |
Synopsis
A retelling of Greek mythology narrated by Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios, who is shunned among her fellow gods and nymphs for lacking their traditional beauty and raw divine power. After falling for a mortal man and using forbidden witchcraft to help him, she draws the anger of the gods around her and is ultimately banished by Zeus to the deserted island of Aiaia, where she is left to build a life alone among plants, animals, and the rare mortal visitors whose ships happen to find her isolated shore, slowly mastering a craft the gods themselves cannot easily take from her.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Song of Achilles and Circe
- Series: The Song of Achilles and Circe core; position 2 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Madeline Miller
Awards (verified)
- Readers' Choice Awards (Fantasy), 2018: won; The awarding body's own 'Announcing the Winners' page, confirmed directly.
- Alex Award (YALSA), 2019: won; ALA/YALSA's own announcement, confirmed directly.
- Mythopoeic Award (Adult Literature), 2019: finalist; Confirmed directly via the Mythopoeic Society's own 2019 results page; the winner was Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver (already in this canon).
- Women's Prize for Fiction, 2019: nominated; Shortlisted; womensprize.com's own site corroborates via its 2019 shortlist reader's guide and celebrity-review pages, though its dedicated shortlist announcement page itself was not fetched directly.
Notes
- From the series record (The Song of Achilles and Circe): Two independent standalone novels retelling Greek mythology, registered as ONE universe under this canon's 'one continuous world/continuity, not one continuous plot' bright line: Circe's own narrative directly overlaps and re-narrates scenes involving Achilles and Patroclus from The Song of Achilles, a genuine textual crossover, not merely a same-author/same-genre coincidence. internal chronology is deliberately left null for both books, matching the treatment of other overlapping chronologies -- Circe's own story begins well before Achilles' birth and continues long after the Trojan War, so the two books' timelines substantially overlap rather than sitting in a clean sequence; publication order is the sourced default. Registered 'sequence' rather than 'duology' since Miller has not stated the pair is permanently closed at 2 books.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within the series The Song of Achilles and Circe: position 2 of 2: previous The Song of Achilles (2011)
Sources
- Wikipedia: The Song of Achilles
- Wikipedia: Circe (novel)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeline_Miller
- ALA: YALSA announces 2019 Alex Awards
- Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Readers' Choice Awards
- Mythopoeic Society: Mythopoeic Awards 2019
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