Books like Paradise Lost
Satan, cast out of Heaven after his rebellion, makes his way to Eden and tempts Adam and Eve, in an epic poem that makes the Devil its most compelling character.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Paradise Lost
The Divine Comedy
A poet journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise guided by Virgil and Beatrice, mapping the entire moral architecture of the medieval Christian universe.
The Mahabharata
The epic war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, contains within it countless stories, including the Bhagavad Gita, and every moral question imaginable.
Omeros
An epic poem with Homer in its bones, set among the fishermen of St Lucia, where Achille and Hector fight over Helen.
The Aeneid
Aeneas flees burning Troy and journeys across the Mediterranean to Italy to found the people who will build Rome, in Virgil's epic of duty, loss and destiny.
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
Jesus of Nazareth reimagined as a fully human man, doubting, loving and in open dispute with God, in Saramago's provocative retelling of the Gospels.
Interview with the Vampire
In a San Francisco room, a vampire tells a young reporter his story, from his making on an eighteenth-century Louisiana plantation to his years with Lestat and the child vampire Claudia.
The Iliad
The rage of Achilles drives the climax of the Trojan War, and the grief that follows reshapes what heroism means.
The Odyssey
After the Trojan War, Odysseus spends ten years trying to get home to Ithaca, through monsters, gods and temptations, while his wife holds off the suitors who have taken over his house.
Metamorphoses
Gods, nymphs, and mortals transform into trees, rivers, animals, and stars in a sweeping poem that contains virtually every myth the Western world inherited.
Beowulf: A New Translation
Seamus Heaney's muscular, luminous translation of the oldest great English epic, in which the hero Beowulf fights Grendel, Grendel's mother and, in old age, a dragon.
The Shadow of the Torturer
Severian, an apprentice in the guild of torturers on a far-future, dying Earth, is exiled for showing mercy to a prisoner, and begins the journey that opens The Book of the New Sun.
Doctor Faustus
A German biographer writes during the Reich's collapse about his friend, a composer who contracted for twenty-four years of genius in a Leipzig brothel.