The Song of Achilles
by Madeline Miller
Summary
Patroclus tells it. An awkward, unpromising prince, he is exiled as a boy to Phthia after killing another child in a stupid accident, and there he is claimed, to everyone's bafflement including his own, by Achilles: golden, swift, the best of all the Greeks, son of a sea goddess who regards Patroclus the way one regards mould. The novel is their life together, from boyhood through the centaur Chiron's mountain school to the summons that ends everything, because Helen has gone to Troy and every man who swore an oath must follow.
Miller's wager is to play the love story completely straight, tender, physical and doomed, and let the reader's knowledge of the Iliad supply the dread. Thetis hides Achilles among the girls on Skyros; the war finds him anyway, along with the prophecy that makes every choice a countdown: Troy will not fall without him, and he will not leave it alive. Nine years of war harden Achilles into his pride, Briseis, rescued by Patroclus, becomes the book's quiet third conscience, and the quarrel with Agamemnon sets the trap the epic demands. Patroclus puts on the armour, and the novel does the impossible thing its narration has promised: it keeps telling the story after he is dead, through the rage, the desecrations and the burial, to Thetis's last, relenting act at the tomb.
Around three hundred and seventy pages, fast, clear and openly romantic.
Best for readers who want the Iliad as a love story with the mythology intact, and are prepared to be wrecked by an ending they knew from the first page.
Historical Context & Significance
The Song of Achilles won the Orange Prize in 2012, with Joanna Trollope, chairing the judges, declaring Homer would be proud; not every classicist agreed, and the book took its share of condescension as a romance in armour. Madeline Miller, a Latin and Greek teacher, had spent ten years on it, discarding a complete draft along the way, and built it scrupulously from the Iliad, Ovid and the mythographers.
The afterlife is the extraordinary part. A steady seller for a decade, the novel detonated in 2021 when TikTok's reading community adopted it, and the BookTok surge put a ten year old book back onto bestseller lists at one point selling faster than when it was new; by 2022 it had passed two million copies. With Circe, her 2018 successor, Miller had effectively founded the modern myth retelling boom, and the shelf of Greek heroines with novels of their own that followed is her doing as much as anyone's.