Books like The Song of Achilles, according to Reddit

The read-alike list

Ranked by co-mention strength — how often each book shares a thread with The Song of Achilles, normalized so ubiquitous books don't dominate.

#1

Circe

Madeline Miller

Exiled to an empty island for turning a rival into a monster, a minor goddess spends immortality perfecting the one power the gods never bothered to master.

6 shared threads

#2

Uprooted

Naomi Novik

A village girl is taken by an ancient wizard as tribute every ten years, until the year his choice turns out to be a mistake he can't undo.

3 shared threads

#3

The Goblin Emperor

Katherine Addison

An airship explosion kills every relative ahead of him in line, and the half-goblin son nobody wanted becomes emperor overnight.

3 shared threads

#4

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

A disillusioned physicist's daughter answers a signal from another star and invites the invasion of Earth out of spite for humanity.

6 shared threads

#5

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel

A flu wipes out civilization overnight, and twenty years later a traveling troupe performs Shakespeare in the ruins for gas-station towns.

3 shared threads

#6

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A dying astronaut wakes up alone on a spaceship with amnesia, two corpses for company, and Earth's one shot at survival riding on him.

5 shared threads

#7

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

A continent-spanning empire's mage-soldiers besiege a city that might already be doomed by gods playing a board game with human pieces.

3 shared threads

#8

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

A proud boy on a poor island learns real magic, casts one spell out of arrogance, and spends the rest of the book hunted by what it let loose.

3 shared threads

#9

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

A nanovirus meant to uplift monkeys lands on spiders instead, and eight thousand years later the last human survivors arrive looking for a new Earth.

6 shared threads

#10

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia, moonlights as a hacker-samurai, and stumbles into a virus that infects minds instead of computers.

4 shared threads

#11

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.

3 shared threads

#12

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

Martha Wells

A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.

5 shared threads

The overlap, in numbers

Where each pairing actually shows up. Click through for the full Reddit verdict on each book.

1. #1 Circe by Madeline Miller — 6 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
2. #2 Uprooted by Naomi Novik — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
3. #3 The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
4. #4 The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin — 6 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
5. #5 Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
6. #6 Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — 5 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
7. #7 Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
8. #8 A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
9. #9 Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky — 6 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
10. #10 Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — 4 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
11. #11 The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien — 3 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF
12. #12 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells — 5 shared threads , mostly in r/printSF