Circe by Madeleine Miller

Members grappled with a completely different kind of novel when they read Circe (pronounced Sir-Sea). The novel brings to life the lesser goddess, nymph and witch, Circe, and with her a swathe of Greek mythology. Members were rushing to Google to find out more about the characters which they half knew/had vaguely heard of, such as Helios, Zeus, Prometheus, Daedalus, Hermes, Ariadne, Minos, Odysseus, Medea, Jason ... and so on! But you don't have to do research to follow and engage with the fantastical story and its characters.

We agreed the book was well written (and not in Homer's poetry which was a real bonus) but not something we would normally read so some of us felt 'expanded' and others that they had lost days of their lives that they would never get back. Some of us felt the first half of the book was slow but picked up once we met Odysseus, the major love interest.

Madeline Miller has stuck to the essential story of Circe as given to us by Homer in The Odyssey. For Homer, Circe was interesting because she was renowned for her potions and spells, for her promiscuity and for turning objects of her jealousy into monsters, not to mention turning Odyssey's men into swine on their voyage home from Troy, until he forces her to turn them back. However, Madeline Miller has weaved a modern sensibility into the book and Circe is sympathetically drawn for modern readers. She seeks the companionship of mortals and expounds on their worth and failings. She must survive as a cast out single female in a world dominated by male gods (the goddesses aren't all that friendly, either).

Through her eyes, we are asked to consider, among other things, what happens to a hospitable single woman on her own on an island when mortal sailors forget you're a goddess, what it is worth giving up your immortality for, and what a grumpy old hero gets up to after he returns from his adventures back to hearth and home. Circe's affairs over the centuries are rather more interesting reading than the antics and tyranny of her arrogant, dysfunctional family. But if it is your thing, there are plenty of graphic scenes filled with vengeful acts, rape, gore and bestiality, too, which come straight from the ancient Greeks and prove there is nothing new under the sun.

Who is Madeleine Miller?

Surprise, surprise, Madeline Miller, 42, is an American novelist who has a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in the Classics. Before becoming a writer, she taught Latin, Greek and Shakespeare to high school students.

Miller's debut novel, The Song of Achilles, was published in 2011 and took her 10 years to write. She was inspired to write the story of Achilles and his lover, Patroclus, after being read The Iliad by her mother as a child. The book was the winner of the 17th Women's Prize for Fiction in 2012, a literary award in the United

Kingdom presented annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year.

Her second novel, Circe, was published last year.