Circe

Circe narrates her own story for the first time, beginning as an awkward, overlooked daughter of the sun god Helios, mocked by her siblings and largely ignored by her father among the glittering cruelty of the Titans' court. She falls for a mortal fisherman, Glaucos, and uses a rare flower steeped in the blood of a fallen Titan to make him immortal, only to watch him fall instantly for the nymph Scylla instead; in jealous grief, Circe uses the same plant to transform Scylla into the six headed sea monster of later legend, the first proof that Circe herself is not merely divine but a witch, a practitioner of pharmaka. For that crime Zeus and her own father exile her permanently to the deserted island of Aiaia, where she spends centuries perfecting her craft, entertaining occasional visitors including the god Hermes, the inventor Daedalus, and her own niece, the sorceress Medea, fleeing with Jason after stealing the Golden Fleece. When a shipwrecked crew's captain rapes her, Circe begins transforming abusive sailors who land on her shore into pigs, sparing only the rare man who treats her decently, a defense that is exactly what awaits Odysseus when he arrives, until his own cleverness earns him a reprieve and, eventually, a year long love affair with her. He returns to his wife Penelope, leaving Circe pregnant with a son, Telegonus, whom she raises alone on Aiaia and fiercely protects from Athena's suspected designs on him. When a grown Telegonus insists on finding his father, Circe reluctantly arms him with a poisoned spear that accidentally kills Odysseus in a chance confrontation Telegonus never intended. Odysseus's widow and son come to Aiaia in the aftermath, and Circe, using knowledge she has held in reserve since witnessing Prometheus's punishment centuries earlier, finally forces her father to end her exile, then gathers her transformative flowers one final time and uses them on herself, choosing to become mortal at last.

Miller keeps the entire sweep of Greek mythology, the Titans, the Minotaur, the Argonauts, the whole Odyssey, tethered to one continuous, first person consciousness, and the effect is to make a figure the Odyssey treats as a minor, dangerous witch into a woman whose long, isolated life a reader comes to know from the inside; it reads warmly and quickly for a book covering literal centuries, propelled by Circe's own patient, increasingly confident voice.