The Lit List – two sides to every story

Top 10: novels retold from another character’s point of view

This month is all about parallel novels: familiar stories from new perspectives. Canonical novels and plays are subverted when minor characters take centre stage. Read on for ten of the best reimagined classics.

1. James by Percival Everett The life of enslaved Jim while he is on the run, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain).
2. Julia by Sandra Newman Winston Smith’s squeeze in 1984 (George Orwell) gains agency.
3. Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons Rosaline came before Juliet (Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare).
4. The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rees Antoinette sheds her madwoman-in-the-attic persona of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë).
5. The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow Mary, the bookish middle daughter in Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen) gets a life.
6. The Song of Achilles by Madeleine Miller The Trojan War and Achilles through the eyes of Patroclus (The Iliad, Homer).
7. March by Geraldine Brooks The American Civil War experiences of Mr March, father of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (Little Women, Louisa May Alcott).
8. Foe by J M Coetzee Friday gets a voice (Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe).
9. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker The cost of war to women, as experienced by former queen Briseis, now concubine of Achilles (The Iliad, Homer)
10. Lady MacBeth by Ava Reid Lady MacBeth casts off the role of villainess (MacBeth, William Shakespeare).

Bubbling under…

• Ophelia by Lisa Klein Ophelia doesn’t drown (Hamlet, William Shakespeare).

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