The Song of Achilles

The Song of Achilles is a novel by the American writer Madeline Miller, published in 2011. Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it retells the Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus, and it follows his relationship with Achilles from their first meeting to their time at Troy. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012, and it is a retelling of the classical material rather than a translation of it.

Patroclus tells the story, and he is the son of King Menoetius. He is among the suitors who court Helen of Troy and is then bound by a blood oath to defend her marriage to Menelaus, which is the oath that later drags the Greek kings to war. After he kills the son of a nobleman in his father's service, he is sent away to Phthia, where he meets Achilles, whose father is King Peleus and whose mother is the sea nymph Thetis.

Achilles is golden, fast and destined for glory, and his mother does not want a mortal anywhere near her son. The two of them grow up together and train together, and then the oath pulls them to Troy, where the siege lasts ten years and glory means something different up close. The leaders argue over a woman neither of them will give up, and the half of the story everyone knows is coming.

Miller writes the whole novel in Patroclus's voice, so the famous war reaches the reader through the person the myths treat as a footnote. It is a standalone novel, and a companion book, Circe, followed in 2018, with this novel treating the relationship as the centre of the story rather than as a subplot.