The Bull from the Sea

Mary Renault picks up Theseus's story after Crete and carries it through friendship, war, conquest, forbidden love with the Amazon Hippolyta, and finally the devastating tragedy of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Her lean, spare prose makes ancient Greece feel lived-in rather than costumed, and her psychological realism is the novel's greatest strength — these are mythological figures who feel like people. The Phaedra section, built around a false accusation of rape and its consequences, is disturbing by design and handled with literary seriousness rather than exploitation, but it is adult material. The novel is also more episodic than The King Must Die, and readers unfamiliar with that predecessor will be lost. For adult readers of literary historical fiction who are willing to start at the beginning of the series, Renault remains one of the finest writers in the genre.