The best modern retellings of classic literature

Fragile is a modern Gothic psychological thriller with a contemporary twist on the classic novel Rebecca, from award-winning and critically acclaimed writer Sarah Hilary.

Nell Ballard is a runaway. A former foster child with a dark secret she is desperate to keep, all Nell wants is to find a place she can belong. So when a job comes up at Starling Villas, home to the enigmatic Robin Wilder, she seizes the opportunity with both hands. But her new lodgings may not be the safe haven that she was hoping for. Her employer lives by a set of rigid rules and she soon sees that he is hiding secrets of his own.

Helen Fielding’s hilarious and heartwarming Bridget Jones’s Diary reimagined Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy’s romance in mid-nineties London, but readers and writers alike have traditionally had little time for the overlooked middle Bennet sister Mary. Janice Hadlow, however, gives life to Mary Bennet, cast aside amidst the glory of her sisters. In The Other Bennet Sister, we see Mary as a person fighting for validation in a family where she feels she doesn’t belong, but for whom there might be a happy ending after all.

Inspired by the life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a fictitious biography of a young Elizabethan nobleman who wakes one morning to find himself a woman. But what if he were a gay university student from the 90s who could shapeshift at will into a man or woman’s body? This is the reality for Paul Polydoris, the star of Andrea Lawler’s radical retelling, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Taking inspiration from The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid and many more Greek myths, Natalie Haynes retells the story of The Trojan War and its aftermath from the perspective of those who were originally silenced: the girls, the women and the goddesses. Impeccably researched, A Thousand Ships takes the stories we are so familiar with and gives them a refreshing, feminist twist.

Brian Bilston’s Diary of a Somebody is a brilliant spin-off of George and Weedon Grossmith’s original comic tale, The Diary of a Nobody. Both told in diary form, George and Weedon document the ups and downs of pompous Charles Pooter in a satire of middle-class suburbia. Whilst using poetry, Brian navigates the everyday monotony of spreadsheets, ex-wives and his arch-nemesis, Toby Salt.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a poetic evocation of storms and island life, rife with magic, romance and politics. Inspired by this masterpiece, Safiya Sinclair’s poetry collection Cannibal mirrors many of the same themes as she explores postcolonial identity, her childhood in Jamaica and the female body.

This feminist retelling of Jane Eyre gives us the other side of the story, told from the point of view of Bertha Rochester. When heiress Antoinette Cosway, living in the oppressive colonial society of 1930s Jamaica, meets a young Englishman, he is immediately drawn to her innocent beauty and sensuality. But, after their marriage, disturbing rumours begin to turn her husband against her. As he is driven into the arms of another woman, Antoinette is driven towards madness. 

Jeanette Winterson’s funny and inventive novel is inspired by Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece Frankenstein, and ranges from 1816, when Mary Shelley wrote her novel to a present-day cryonics facility where the dead wait to return to life. Young transgender doctor Ry is falling in love – against their better judgement – with celebrated AI-specialist, Professor Victor Stein, while Ron Lord plans to make his fortune with his range of sex dolls for lonely men.