Summary

Historical fiction is nothing new. Period-set stories have existed as long as storytelling itself as a means of romanticizing the past, contextualizing the present, or simply filling in the gaps of a historical record. But the past decade has been especially ripe for stories in the third category: books that center on the voices left out of historical events, or even reimagine classic stories from new perspectives. In the late 2010s, Madeline Miller’s Greek mythology-inspired work prompted a wave of books that reimagined or modernized stories from classical mythology.

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