The Song of Achilles
You know how it ends from the first page. Miller makes you fall in love with these two anyway. The ending destroys you completely.
Best of All the Greeks
Madeline Miller's 2011 Orange Prize-winning novel retells the Trojan War from the perspective of Patroclus, a gentle, unexceptional prince who is exiled to the court of King Peleus and becomes the closest companion of his golden son Achilles. As they grow from childhood through adolescence to the war at Troy, their bond deepens into something the Iliad barely names but that Miller renders with full clarity and heartbreak. Written over ten years while Miller taught Latin and Greek, the novel transforms Homer's epic into one of literature's most painful love stories.
Reading The Song of Achilles
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"I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way he breathed.
"Madeline Miller
Miller spent ten years writing the novel while working full time as a Latin and Greek teacher. She submitted it to publishers while still teaching and received her offer on the day of a school field trip.
The novel won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2012. Miller attended the ceremony alone, not expecting to win, and had to give a speech she had not prepared. She called it the happiest night of her life.