Where to Start with Claire North: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Claire North — how to approach Ithaca, her feminist retelling of the Odyssey narrated by Hera as Penelope waits for Odysseus to return. A complete reading guide.
Claire North is a pseudonym of the British author Catherine Webb, who also writes fantasy under the name Kate Griffin. Ithaca (2022) is the first novel in her Penelope series — a feminist retelling of the years depicted in Homer’s Odyssey, narrated not by Penelope but by the goddess Hera, watching events unfold from Olympus with a mixture of political calculation and genuine feeling. A second novel, House of Odysseus, followed in 2023.
Where to Start: Ithaca (2022)
The essential Claire North — and one of the most accomplished entries in the wave of feminist classical retellings that has reshaped literary fiction over the past decade. Ithaca begins where most versions of the Odyssey do not: in the palace at Ithaca, years into Odysseus’s absence, where his wife Penelope is managing a deteriorating situation with remarkable skill and very little credit.
The suitors are the novel’s central dramatic problem. Penelope is presumed widowed, her husband long overdue from Troy. The men who have gathered to compete for her hand and her kingdom are not merely unwanted guests but an active drain on her household — consuming her food, intimidating her servants, and complicating her political position. She cannot send them away without creating enemies, cannot accept one without provoking the others, and cannot leave without abandoning everything she has held together. North’s Penelope navigates this situation not as a passive victim but as a shrewd political operator, making alliances, managing information, and playing the suitors against each other with quiet precision.
The Hera narration is the novel’s most distinctive formal choice. The queen of the gods watches Penelope’s predicament from a position of divine detachment that is perpetually complicated by something closer to admiration. Hera has her own reasons for caring about the outcome — Olympian politics, rivalries with other gods, and the complex relationship between divine will and human agency — and her narration gives North access to irony and perspective unavailable to a purely human narrator. Hera knows more than Penelope does, sees further than she can, and yet finds herself repeatedly surprised by what Penelope manages with what she has.
The novel is also a portrait of the women of the palace as a collective. Penelope’s maids — who in the original Odyssey are executed for their associations with the suitors — are given interior lives and genuine complexity. Their relationships with the suitors are not simply disloyalty but survival strategies in a household where power has been uncertain for years. North’s treatment of these women, typically footnotes in the classical tradition, is among the most politically thoughtful in the genre.
North writes at a consistently high literary pitch. The prose is precise and often beautiful, the pacing controlled, and the emotional intelligence of the novel — its understanding of what it costs to wait, to manage, to hold things together without acknowledgement — is the work’s deepest achievement.
Why Ithaca Is an Ideal First Book
For a reader new to Claire North, Ithaca is an ideal first book because it is among her acclaimed recent novels and a fine expression of her distinctive gifts, the inventive premises, the intelligence, and the fresh, often mythic reimagining of familiar stories. Ithaca retells the story of the Greek myth of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who must hold her kingdom together during her husband’s long absence, giving voice and agency to a woman long left at the margins of the epic. As an entry point it is excellent, for it showcases North’s gift for taking a known story or striking idea and rendering it with intelligence, freshness, and emotional depth. It welcomes the newcomer with its compelling reimagining, its rich voice, and its thoughtful perspective, drawing the reader into her inventive and intelligent storytelling. It is among her notable recent works and a fine representation of her gifts, so the new reader encounters North at her most characteristic. For the newcomer, then, Ithaca is an excellent starting point.
What to Expect as a New Reader
As a new reader, you can expect Ithaca to be an intelligent, fresh, and richly imagined retelling of Greek myth. You can expect a reimagined story, for North retells the myth of Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, centering the woman left to hold a kingdom together during her husband’s long absence. You can expect a fresh perspective, for the novel gives voice, agency, and interiority to a figure long kept at the margins of the epic. You can expect intelligence and depth, for North brings thoughtful insight to questions of power, gender, survival, and storytelling. You can expect a rich, distinctive narrative voice and atmosphere. You can expect the qualities that mark North’s work more broadly, the inventiveness, the intelligence, and the fresh reimagining of the familiar. You can expect a literate and rewarding reading experience. Expect, in short, an intelligent, fresh, and richly imagined retelling of Greek myth, a fine introduction to North’s gifts.
Going Deeper After Your First Book
Once Ithaca has introduced you to North’s gifts, the reader who wishes to go deeper can explore her wider and notably varied body of work, which ranges across speculative fiction, fantasy, and inventive reimaginings, always marked by striking premises and intelligence. Her acclaimed earlier novels include high-concept speculative stories built on arresting ideas, such as lives lived over and over and the strange workings of memory and identity, each developed with her characteristic intelligence and imagination. Reading these after Ithaca deepens your appreciation of North’s distinctive gifts, the inventive premises, the intelligence, and the fresh, thoughtful storytelling. Her characteristic strengths run through her work, even as she moves between very different kinds of story. Building your reading journey through North is a matter of following her inventive storytelling from Ithaca into her speculative novels and her other reimaginings. The reader who begins here and continues will find one of the most inventive and intelligent storytellers in contemporary fiction.
Reading Claire North
Begin with Ithaca — it is her most celebrated recent work and the entry point to the Penelope series. House of Odysseus (2023) continues directly; both can be read as standalones but reward sequential reading.
For the full Claire North bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Claire North author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Claire North?
Ithaca (2022) is Claire North's most celebrated recent work — a feminist retelling of the Odyssey narrated by Hera, watching over Penelope in Ithaca as the suitors gather and Odysseus fails to return. Richly written and emotionally compelling, it centres the women of Greek myth with the same rigour Madeline Miller brought to Circe and Pat Barker to The Silence of the Girls.
What is Ithaca about?
Ithaca retells the years of the Odyssey from the perspective of those left behind — specifically Penelope, her maids, and the goddess Hera who narrates the novel. While Odysseus wanders, Penelope must manage a palace overrun by suitors who consume her household's resources and compete for her hand. North's Penelope is politically shrewd, emotionally complex, and entirely capable — a figure of genuine agency rather than passive waiting.
How does Ithaca compare to other mythological retellings?
Ithaca sits alongside Madeline Miller's Circe, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, and Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships in the wave of feminist classical retellings that centre women excluded from the original narratives. North's distinctive contribution is Hera as narrator — a goddess with her own political interests and complicated feelings about Penelope's situation, which gives the novel a wry, Olympian perspective that differs from the purely human focus of its contemporaries.
What should I read after Ithaca?
After Ithaca, Madeline Miller's Circe covers another sidelined female figure from Greek mythology with comparable literary quality. Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships retells the Trojan War from the women's perspectives. Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls covers Briseis during the Iliad — the most directly comparable in its political intelligence and narrative focus.
