Observer’s Book Pile: The Best Retellings of the Classics
These are stories we know and love rewritten to speak to a contemporary truth.
Read More
There’s something intoxicating about timeless tales recast in modern contexts. Great writers from the past like William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer and Emily Brontë built brilliant narrative scaffoldings that the great writers of the present are using to transplant old stories to new places their source authors never imagined they’d go: 1920s Shanghai, a British pub, an ice rink—the possibilities are endless.
Retellings and reimaginings are having a moment in the publishing industry as readers can’t seem to get enough of them. Mixing newer releases with popular and beloved adaptations, this list offers eight inimitable examples of classic literary works retold to add to your TBR pile so you can fall in love with your favorite stories all over again.
The Favorites by Layne Fargo
After I devoured The Favorites in less than a day, I could think of little else in the following weeks, and it quickly became one of my top summer reads. A retelling of Emily Brontë’s heart-wrenching Wuthering Heights set in the dazzling yet ruthless world of competitive ice dancing, The Favorites tells a tale spanning decades of passion, ambition, revenge and resentment. Two smitten dancers ascend to the Olympics from nothing as the dirtiest parts of fame and competition test their connection. Layne Fargo sprinkles easter eggs throughout this tense and unputdownable novel—the male protagonist’s name, Heath, whose surname Rocha means “cliff” in Portuguese, is a nod to Brontë’s brooding romantic hero.
The Wife of Willesden by Zadie Smith
Who knew Chaucer could be so timely? The work of the iconic English poet is reincarnated in Zadie Smith’s lively stage play, translated directly from The Wife of Bath in decasyllabic lines. First presented at the Kiln Theatre in Brent, England in 2020 to celebrate Smith’s neighborhood as the London Borough of Culture, the adaptation centers on Jamaican-born Alvita, now in her mid-fifties, as she recounts her life story to a group of strangers. Pilgrimage becomes a pub crawl in Smith’s reimagining, but like its source text—incredibly subversive for its time—the play is fiercely feminist and plenty of fun.
James by Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (now in development as a film to be produced by Steven Spielberg) has gotten a lot of attention over the past year, counting the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award among its various accolades. Told from the perspective of the enslaved James, Everett’s novel follows the eponymous protagonist as he crosses paths with Huck, but Everett also imagines the scenes that Mark Twain left out, rigorously developing James’ character to show him as deeply perceptive and intelligent.
Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
You can’t create a list of the best retellings without Shakespeare. In this fever dream of a novel, Ava Reid recasts the classic Shakespearean villainess as Roscille, a seventeen-year-old plucked from her homeland and shipped off to marry a towering Scottish ruler. The story’s remote setting—a Scottish fortress—echoes Roscille’s psychological enclosure as she reckons with her grim marriage to a brutish husband. Attempting to survive in a world cruel to her kind, Roscille conjures smart solutions for the best of the men around her.
Athena’s Child by Hannah Lynn
We’ve recently lived through a golden age of Greek mythology retellings, with Madeline Miller’s celebrated duo of The Song of Achilles and Circe, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind and even romantasy adaptations like Jasmine Mas’ snarky Blood of Hercules. The lesser-known novel, Athena’s Child, tells the story of Medusa, the supposed snake-haired savage who turns men to stone in stories by Greek greats like Hesiod, Homer and Apollodorus. Flipping the narrative, Hannah Lynn’s novel investigates the acts of injustice that made Medusa into a monster and how quest-bound Perseus’ tale intersects with hers in harrowing ways.
The Wrath & the Dawn by Renée Ahdieh
Drawing from the medieval Middle Eastern folktale collection One Thousand and One Nights, New York Times bestseller The Wrath & the Dawn tells the story of the seemingly malevolent boy-king Khalid and his wife Shahrzad. Before she volunteers to wed him, he takes a new wife every night and each is dead by daybreak. Shahrzad is the notable exception. Enthralling and atmospheric, this first title in a duology breathes fresh life into the well-trodden Arabian story, questioning if Khalid is all he seems. Nothing is as it seems—especially when love enters the equation.
These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong
Capulet becomes Cai and Montague becomes Montagov in this updated Romeo and Juliet. Though reimaginings of this tale of young lovers abound, from Broadway adaptations to women-centered novelizations, Chloe Gong’s debut stands out for transplanting Shakespeare to 1920s Shanghai, where rival gangs feud. The two protagonists are former flapper Juliette of the Scarlet Gang and her first love, Roma of the White Flowers. The first of a duology, the book takes its title from the source: “These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, / Which, as they kiss, consume.”
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins
This deliciously domestic thriller takes inspiration from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Pairing shades of nineteenth-century gothic with contemporary thrills and feminist motifs, The Wife Upstairs follows a dogwalker in Birmingham, Alabama, as she meets the recently widowed Eddie Rochester—someone who might offer Jane a chance at the kind of life she has always dreamed of. But it soon becomes clear Jane might never get her perfect ending because some secrets refuse to remain in the past.
