Classics Retold

Classic novels rewritten for modern audiences and introduced to new generations of readers.
Updated September 19, 2022
Unbound Librarians
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Boy, Snow, Bird
Helen Oyeyemi
Paper Book
As seen on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was described as "gloriously unsettling... evoking Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Angela Carter, Edgar Allan Poe, Gabriel García Márquez, Chris Abani and even Emily Dickinson," and already one of the year's most...
The reimagined story of Snow White set in 1950s America.
On Beauty
Zadie Smith
Paper Book
One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin...
Loosely based on E.M. Forster's Howard's End, set in modern day U.K.
The Hours
Michael Cunningham
Paper Book
A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author ofA Home at the End of the WorldandFlesh and Blood. InThe Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia...
Three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by Mrs Dalloway.
Sansei and Sensibility
Karen Tei Yamashita
Paper Book
In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance--familial, cultural, emotional, artistic--really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives'...
Inspired, of course, by Sense & Sensibility.
Telling Tales
Patience Agbabi
Paper Book
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TED HUGHES PRIZE 2015 Tabard Inn to Canterb'ry Cathedral, Poet pilgrims competing for free picks, Chaucer Tales, track by track, it's the remix From below-the-belt base to the topnotch; I won't stop all the clocks with a stopwatch...
Inspired by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Margaret Atwood
Paper Book
Margaret Atwood returns with a shrewd, funny, and insightful retelling of the myth of Odysseus from the point of view of Penelope. Describing her own remarkable vision, the author writes in the foreword, "I've chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids....
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Tom Stoppard
Paper Book
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is a play which, as it were, takes place in the wings of Hamlet, and finds both humour and poignancy in the situation of the ill-fated attendant lords. The National Theatre production in April 1967 made Tom Stoppard's reputation virtually...
March
Geraldine Brooks
Paper Book
Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize For Fiction. From the author of the acclaimed YEAR OF WONDERS, an historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks gives us the story of the absent...
Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi
Paper Book
*International Booker Prize finalist* "Brave and ingenious." --The New York Times "Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound." --Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment "Extraordinary . . . A...
Home Fire
Kamila Shamsie
Paper Book
"From an internationally acclaimed novelist, the suspenseful and heartbreaking story of a family ripped apart by secrets and driven to pit love against loyalty, with devastating consequences. Isma is free. After years of watching out for her younger siblings in the wake of their mother's death, an...
A retelling of Sophocles's Antigone set among British Muslims.
Medea
Christa Wolf
Paper Book
Medea is among the most notorious women in the canon of Greek tragedy: a woman scorned who sacrifices her own children to her jealous rage. In her gripping new novel, Christa Wolf explodes this myth, revealing a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a brutal political battle. Medea, driven by her...
An exploration of Greek mythology's Medea.
Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis
Ali Smith
Paper Book
From the astonishingly talented writer of The Accidental and Hotel World comes Ali Smith's brilliant retelling of Ovid's gender-bending myth of Iphis and Ianthe, as seen through the eyes of two Scottish sisters. Girl Meets Boy is about girls and boys, girls and girls, love...
Based on Ovid's story "Iphis and Ianthe" from his Metamorphoses.
Grendel
John Gardner
Paper Book
The Beowulf story retold from the monster's point of view reveals the darker side of human nature and values.
The retelling of the Old English poem Beowulf from the perspective of the antagonist, Grendel.

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