Formerly known as a bit player in the Odyssey, Circe’s life story is offered here, full of salt and herbs and sex. Madeline Miller’s Circeoffers a very different sort of origin story, this time for the witch banished by Zeus to live out her days on Aeaea. Opening in Jamaica in the immediate aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, it considers the deep scars inflicted by colonial rule on a landscape and its inhabitants. Nowhere is this clearer than in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s classic prequel to Jane Eyre. Islands are perfect settings for origin stories: places where characters can be formed before moving into the larger and often hostile world. In stark and uncompromisingly visceral language, a flesh-and-blood mermaid is hauled into a fishing boat off the coast of an imaginary Caribbean island, and what ensues is a brutal and intriguing story about ownership, jealousy and the dangers of a tale passed mouth to mouth by bitter tongues. Another fabulist take on island tales is Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch, this year’s Costa prize winner.
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