There is something rather magnificent about a story that refuses to stay put.
The great works of literature — the ones that have slipped, at last, from the grip of copyright and into the public domain — were never really finished. They were merely set down for a time, like a traveler resting at an inn, always destined to take to the road again. And when the right author comes along, these old tales rise up and stretch and become something they never quite were before — which is to say, perhaps something they always secretly wanted to be.
We have gathered here seventeen such books: novels that take the bones of beloved classics and build them into new creatures entirely.
1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Inspired by: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
If Dickens were alive today, we suspect he would live in the mountains of Virginia and write exactly this book. Demon Copperhead transposes the architecture of David Copperfield into the modern Appalachian landscape with such ferocious precision that every character finds a counterpart, and every social ill Dickens railed against in Victorian England finds its mirror in the opioid crisis.
Damon Fields — nicknamed “Demon Copperhead” for his red hair — is born to a single teenage mother in a trailer park, and from that first breath, he narrates his own story with the kind of voice you’d follow anywhere: wry, wounded, stubbornly alive. Through foster homes, exploitation, addiction, and the rare kindness of strangers, Demon’s journey maps the classic’s plot onto a world Dickens would have recognized immediately — one in which the systems meant to protect the vulnerable instead devour them.
The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women’s Prize for Fiction, making Kingsolver the first author to win the latter twice. It is that rare retelling that needs no knowledge of its source to devastate you, yet rewards every reader who catches the echoes.
2. The Wendy by Erin Michelle Sky & Steven Brown
Inspired by: Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
We confess a particular fondness for this one. The Wendy takes the world of Peter Pan — that eternal playground of flight and shadow — and does something positively delightful: it makes Wendy Darling the story’s beating heart without diminishing an ounce of magic.
Set in London in 1789, this reimagining casts Wendy as a young woman who dreams of captaining a ship in a world that won’t allow women in the Royal Navy. When the Home Office begins secretly recruiting women to fight the most formidable threat England has ever faced — magic itself — Wendy joins their ranks and finds herself alongside a reimagined cast of the original tale, from a Peter Pan who is every bit as irrepressible as you remember, to a Hook who is far more complicated than you expect.
What makes this retelling extraordinary is the voice — whimsical, warm, and genuinely witty, with the cadence of a classic and the soul of something entirely new. As one reviewer put it, “Barrie would be proud.” The complete Tales of the Wendy trilogy is now available, comprising The Wendy, The Navigator, and The Captain, so you needn’t wait between volumes.
3. Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Inspired by: Cinderella by Charles Perrault
One might think the tale of Cinderella had been told in every possible fashion — but one would be quite spectacularly wrong. Marissa Meyer’s Cinder reimagines the beloved fairy tale as science fiction, setting it in a futuristic New Beijing where the heroine is not merely downtrodden but part machine — a cyborg mechanic with a talent for fixing things and a deeply inconvenient mystery buried in her own past.
There is still a prince — the charmingly burdened Prince Kai, grappling with a deadly plague and the menacing queen of the Lunar colony who has designs on his throne and, we suspect, rather a great deal else. There is still a wicked stepmother. There is still a ball. But where Perrault gave us glass slippers and a pumpkin coach, Meyer gives us cybernetic limbs and a rusted orange Volkswagen, and somehow the magic is not diminished in the slightest — it is merely rerouted through entirely different circuits.
Cinder launched The Lunar Chronicles, a four-book series that reimagines a different fairy tale in each volume, and it proved what we have long suspected: that the best fairy tales are not fragile things but engines, capable of powering stories their original tellers could never have dreamed.
4. Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
Inspired by: Cinderella by Charles Perrault
If Cinder proves that Cinderella can thrive in the future, Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted proves she was always more interesting than the original tale let on. At birth, Ella of Frell is “blessed” by a well-meaning but spectacularly foolish fairy with the gift of obedience — she must do whatever anyone directly tells her to do. It is, as gifts go, roughly equivalent to wrapping a curse in ribbon and calling it a present.
What follows is not the patient suffering of Perrault’s heroine but a spirited, clever, frequently hilarious quest to break the enchantment, during which Ella contends with ogres, attends finishing school under protest, befriends elves, and falls quite thoroughly for a prince named Char who has no idea about the spell that binds her. Levine’s great achievement is transforming Cinderella from a passive recipient of fairy-tale rescue into someone who fights for her own freedom with wit, courage, and a stubbornness we find entirely admirable.
A Newbery Honor Book and one of the most beloved fantasy novels of its generation, Ella Enchanted has been delighting readers for nearly three decades — and we suspect it will continue doing so for three decades more, at minimum.
5. James by Percival Everett
Inspired by: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Percival Everett looked at one of the most celebrated novels in the American canon and asked a question that, once heard, seems almost unforgivably overdue: What if Jim told the story?
In James, the enslaved man from Twain’s Huckleberry Finn — here called by his proper name, James — is secretly literate, deeply philosophical, and infinitely more perceptive than the characters who surround him. When he learns he is about to be sold downriver and torn from his family, he flees to Jackson Island, encounters young Huck, and embarks on a journey that Twain narrated as adventure but Everett reveals as survival.
The result is philosophically rich and at times almost unbearably tense. James won the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction — a rather thorough endorsement from the literary establishment that this retelling was long overdue.
6. Circe by Madeline Miller
Inspired by: The Odyssey by Homer
Homer gave Circe a single island and a few pages. Madeline Miller gave her an entire life.
Born the daughter of the sun god Helios, Circe is scorned by her divine family for lacking their radiance and power. But she discovers an affinity for witchcraft — the forbidden art of pharmaka — and this talent earns her not admiration but exile to the island of Aiaia, where she hones her craft in solitude across centuries. Lions pad through her halls. Heroes and monsters wash up on her shores. And eventually, a certain Ithacan king arrives, and their encounter becomes something far more complex than a footnote in someone else’s epic.
Miller’s prose has been called “magical without being twee,” and her reimagining transforms a minor mythological figure into one of the most fully realized protagonists in modern fiction. Circe debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
7. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
Inspired by: The Iliad by Homer
Miller’s first novel performs a similar feat of alchemy with Homer’s other great epic. The Song of Achilles retells the Trojan War not through the eyes of its mightiest warrior but through those of Patroclus, the exiled prince who becomes Achilles’s companion — and, in Miller’s tender rendering, the love of his life.
Where Homer’s Iliad thunders with the clash of bronze and the will of gods, Miller’s novel moves with the quiet intensity of two people who know that glory and death are the same destination. Patroclus follows Achilles to Troy not for honor but for love, and in doing so becomes the emotional center of a story that has been told for three thousand years without ever being told like this.
The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and has since become one of the most beloved books of its generation — proof, if any were needed, that the oldest stories still have secrets to surrender.
8. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Inspired by: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë locked a woman in an attic and called her mad. Jean Rhys unlocked the door and let her speak.
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of Antoinette Cosway — the woman Brontë named Bertha Mason — a Creole heiress growing up in Jamaica in the 1830s amid the volatile aftermath of emancipation. Rhys imagines Antoinette’s youth, her marriage to an unnamed Englishman recognizable as Rochester, and her slow, devastating unraveling as her husband renames her, redefines her, and ultimately imprisons her in his cold English estate.
Published in 1966, this novel is widely regarded as one of the finest of the twentieth century and arguably the retelling that invented the genre as we know it. It is a book that makes it impossible to read Jane Eyre quite the same way again — which is perhaps the highest compliment a retelling can earn.
9. Grendel by John Gardner
Inspired by: Beowulf
What does the monster think about while he’s being a monster?
John Gardner’s 1971 masterpiece answers that question with a novel narrated by the fearsome Grendel himself — not as a mindless beast, but as a lonely, philosophically tormented creature who watches human civilization from the margins and cannot decide whether it is beautiful or absurd. Over twelve chapters, each loosely corresponding to a different school of philosophical thought, Grendel recounts his years of war against King Hrothgar’s people, his conversations with a nihilistic dragon, and his fascination with the Shaper, a poet whose songs make the meaningless appear meaningful.
The novel is darkly funny, deeply strange, and utterly unforgettable. It remains one of the most widely taught retellings in American literature — proof that even a thousand-year-old poem still has room for a new point of view.
10. Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
Inspired by: The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Margaret Atwood’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series is a cunning Russian nesting doll of a novel — a retelling that contains, within itself, a production of the very play it retells.
Felix Phillips, an acclaimed theatre director, is betrayed and exiled from his position by a trusted colleague — mirroring Prospero’s banishment from Milan. Years later, reduced to teaching a literacy program in a prison, Felix seizes the opportunity to stage The Tempest with his inmate cast and engineer an elaborate revenge against the men who destroyed his career.
The title itself is an insult Prospero hurls at Caliban in the original play, and Atwood’s novel embraces the Bard’s ambiguities rather than resolving them. Her inmates’ sharp, irreverent interpretations of Shakespeare’s text add yet another layer, creating a retelling that is at once deeply insightful about its source and magnificently entertaining on its own terms.
11. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
Inspired by: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Helen Fielding performed a feat of translation so inspired that it hardly seems like translation at all — she took the essential architecture of Pride and Prejudice and rebuilt it in 1990s London, where the drawing rooms became wine bars, the entailed estates became flatshares, and the mortifying mother remained, we are delighted to report, entirely unchanged.
Bridget Jones is a thirty-something singleton whose diary chronicles her battles with calories, cigarettes, and the eternal question of whether she will die alone and be found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. Into her orbit come two men: the seemingly rude but secretly decent Mark Darcy — Fielding does not even bother to disguise the name, and we rather love her for it — and the devastatingly charming Daniel Cleaver, who is every bit as dangerous as his Austen counterpart and considerably less troubled by it.
What makes the novel endure is not merely the comedy — though it is spectacularly, painfully funny — but Fielding’s genuine affection for her heroine. Bridget is no fool playing at foolishness; she is a smart woman navigating a world that sends contradictory messages about what she ought to be, and her diary is both the record and the resistance. It became a cultural phenomenon for a reason, and that reason has not dimmed.
12. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Inspired by: Antigone by Sophocles
Some plays are so ancient that we forget they are also current. Kamila Shamsie remembered.
Home Fire transplants Sophocles’s Antigone into the lives of a British Muslim family, where the conflict between state law and familial love is no longer theoretical but terrifyingly immediate. The Pasha siblings — older sister Isma and twins Aneeka and Parvaiz — live in the shadow of their deceased father’s legacy, and when Parvaiz makes a catastrophic choice, Aneeka’s desperate efforts to save her brother entangle her with the son of a powerful politician whose career depends on being merciless.
Structured in five sections like the acts of a Greek tragedy, each told from a different character’s perspective, the novel builds with the same sickening inevitability as its ancient source. Home Fire won the Women’s Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
13. Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
Inspired by: The Aeneid by Virgil
In all of Virgil’s epic poem, Lavinia — the Latin princess whom Aeneas is fated to marry — never speaks a single word. Ursula K. Le Guin found this rather insufficient.
In her novel, Lavinia narrates her own story in the first person, fully aware that she exists within a poem being written by a dying poet. She converses with the shade of Virgil himself, who visits her at a sacred sulfur spring to tell her, with some embarrassment, what he wrote and what he neglected to include. The story follows her from youth through the arrival of the Trojan refugees, her marriage to Aeneas, and the wars and nation-building that follow — continuing well beyond where The Aeneid ends.
Le Guin evokes a half-wild, pre-Roman Italy — muddy, pious, and vividly real — while meditating on the strange relationship between a character and the author who creates her. Lavinia won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and stands as one of the most original retellings ever conceived.
14. The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
Inspired by: “The Horror at Red Hook” by H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft wrote brilliant cosmic horror and harbored truly repugnant prejudices. Victor LaValle decided to use the former against the latter.
The Ballad of Black Tom reimagines Lovecraft’s 1927 story “The Horror at Red Hook” through the eyes of Charles Thomas “Tommy” Tester, a Black street hustler in 1924 Harlem who scrapes by as a fake musician and odd-job man. When a delivery of an occult book draws Tommy into a world of eldritch forces, he encounters cosmic horror from a vantage point Lovecraft never imagined — and LaValle uses that vantage to devastating effect, turning Lovecraft’s own machinery against the prejudices that animated it. The result is a story in which the most terrifying monsters require no tentacles at all.
This novella won the Shirley Jackson Award and the British Fantasy Award, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker Awards — a feat of recognition as astonishing as it is deserved.
15. Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld
Inspired by: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Eligible transplants the Bennet family to modern-day Cincinnati and asks what Pride and Prejudice would look like in an era of reality television, CrossFit, and online dating. The answer, as it turns out, is both hilarious and surprisingly faithful.
Liz Bennet is a thirtyish magazine journalist, Jane is a yoga instructor, and Chip Bingley — yes, that Bingley — is a former contestant on a reality dating show called Eligible. His aloof friend Fitzwilliam Darcy is an emergency-room doctor whose particular brand of rudeness translates perfectly into contemporary social discomfort. When Mr. Bennet suffers a heart attack and crushing medical bills threaten the family, Austen’s economic anxieties find their modern equivalent.
Written as part of the Austen Project, Sittenfeld’s novel finds clever contemporary parallels for nearly every plot point while maintaining the sharp wit and romantic tension that have made Austen’s original endure for two centuries.
16. Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson
Inspired by: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Jeanette Winterson’s novel weaves together two timelines to ask whether the questions Mary Shelley raised two centuries ago have become even more urgent — and the answer, uncomfortably, is yes.
One strand follows the real Mary Shelley in 1816 Geneva, during the famous summer at the Villa Diodati where she conceived Frankenstein. The other is set in modern Britain, where Ry Shelley, a transgender doctor, falls for Victor Stein, a professor obsessed with artificial intelligence and cryonics who believes technology will soon surpass the human body entirely. Lord Byron, meanwhile, is reborn as Ron Lord, a spectacularly crass entrepreneur manufacturing companion robots.
The parallels between Shelley’s era and our own — the terror of creation, the boundaries of consciousness, the question of what it means to be truly alive — crackle with invention and wit. Frankissstein was longlisted for the Booker Prize.
17. Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige
Inspired by: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
What if Dorothy went back to Oz — and became the villain?
Danielle Paige’s darkly inventive novel follows Amy Gumm, a bullied Kansas teenager who is swept up by a tornado and deposited in Oz, only to discover that this is not the Technicolor wonderland she grew up reading about. Dorothy Gale returned after her original adventure and seized power, becoming a tyrant who drains the land of its magic, while the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion have become her monstrous enforcers.
Amy is recruited by a secret society of witches — the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked — and trained with one purpose: to stop Dorothy. The novel gleefully inverts Baum’s moral universe, suggesting that in Oz, “Wicked” may be a badge of honor and “Good” should never be taken at face value. It became a New York Times bestseller and launched a multi-book series for readers who prefer their fairy tales with teeth.
Stories, we have long believed, are living things. They do not sit obediently on shelves, gathering dust and waiting to be admired. They wander. They change their clothes. They learn new languages and acquire new friends. The seventeen books above are proof that the greatest classics are not monuments to be preserved under glass but invitations — extended across centuries — for someone bold enough to say, “Yes, but what if…?”
We rather think the original authors would approve. Most of them, at any rate.
