Mary Renault

Jan 11, 2024 | shepherd.com | Liz Gloyn |Mary Renault |Bernardine Evaristo |Madeline Miller

Mary Renault’s retelling of the life of the Greek hero Theseus, from his childhood up to escaping the labyrinth, was one of the earliest novels set in the ancient world that I read. It completely captured my imagination through the way it mixes the bones of the myth with a world which tries to reconstruct what it might have been like to live in ancient Greece. Renault’s writing is full of detail and her characters are rich and complicated. Why should I read it?

Aug 3, 2023 | fivebooks.com | Mary Renault |Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie |Khaled Hosseini |Barbara Kingsolver

As a reader, what do you look for in a work of historical fiction? Whatever I’m reading, I want to be carried away. I read every sort of fiction under the sun. I want to be immersed in it—to trust the writer, so that they’re my traveling companion. I need to feel that they know where we’re going, that they know what they’re talking about, and that I’m not being fed tons of nonsense along the way. I want to feel that I’m inhabiting that world with those characters.

Apr 5, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Mary Renault |Miranda Carter

Literary​ fans, as Alan Bennett once remarked, can be off-putting for the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular.