Courtesy of Elle UK Magazine
Posted Sept 4, 2018
From a long list of nine page-turning reads, the winner of the inaugural Big Book Award is a feminist romp through the classical world – Madeline Miller’s Circe!
Even if you don’t know your Athena from your Aphrodite, Circe manages to be a compelling novel for every reader. It tells the story of Homer’s The Odyssey from the point of view of Circe, the first witch in literature, infamous for turning Odysseus’s men into pigs. Here, she gets to tell her own story as a protagonist – not as a side note. As ELLE’s editor-in-chief, Anne-Marie Curtis, one of the Big Book judges, puts it: ‘I never thought I’d describe a book as a feminist romp through Greek mythology, but this is it! Madeline Miller recasts Circe’s witchery in a whole new, empowering light, and the result is a riveting tale for today’s times.’
