5 on Five: Classics Connected

A few of my favorite books inspired by classics

Image courtesy of Audry Fryer at BookishAF

When Deborah Linn McNemee chose Classics Connected books for this month’s theme, I wasn’t surprised given her Substack account is called Keeping Classics. Actually, one of my first Substack posts was about how popular retellings of classic novels and fairy tales remain. If you gave me an hour, I could make a list of 100 Jane Austen or Shakespeare retellings.

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A successful retelling needs to illuminate the original work, allowing us to see it in a new way. The new setting or time period has to be able to stand on its own while still capturing the essence of the original. Some of the most successful adaptations have place a well-known story into a setting initially sound ridiculous like placing Romeo and Juliet in rival street gangs in the upper west side of Manhattan or having Emma be a wealthy student at a Beverly Hills high school.

For that reason, I decided to choose my five books with an emphasis on the setting.

The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)

Considered a prequel to Jane Eyre, this main character in this novel is Mr. Rochester’s first wife. Many British works like Jane Eyre mention colonized islands but Rhys, who grew up in Dominica, shows us Antoinette (Bertha) in her Carribean home. At this post-colonial time period, Antionette’s family has lost their wealth and property in Jamaica because of the end of slavery. Yet, because they are Creole (born in the Caribbean but white) they are looked down upon by the British. Rhys’s descriptions of the lush island setting add to the dream-like quality of Antionette and Mr. Rochester’s early days of marriage.

These Violent Delights by Chloe Gong (2020)

Chloe Gong’s debut had an incredible pitch: Romeo and Juliet in early Republican era Shanghai but with monsters. It’s usually listed as YA but since it’s more of a sequel in a world where Romeo and Juliet were forced to break up—Juliet having been sent to study in America—it doesn’t doesn’t have the teen dynamics you’d expect in a R+J retelling. Shanghai was a glamorous cosmopolitan city in the 1920s—a mixture of East and West. More recently, Gong returned to Shakespeare with another duology based on Antony and Cleopatra.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (2017)

Okay, I’ve raved about Shamsie’s retelling of Antigone before but it’s so perfect for this theme that I couldn’t resist putting it on my list. Set in a British Muslim family who have to endure constant scrutiny because the father had been a jihadi who was captured in Afghanistan and died en route to Guantanamo. When the only son of the family is recruited by ISIS, the family is once again thrown into the public eye and used as an example of why people of Pakistani descent can never be true Brits. Told in five sections, each from a different point of view, I continued thinking about the climax in Pakistan for weeks afterward.

Where the Rhythm Takes You by Sarah Dass (2021)

I picked this book up off the shelf of my high school library, not realizing it was a retelling of Persuasion, my favorite Jane Austen novel. You might be skeptical that a 17 year old girl living with her father in a famous resort in Tobago who is forced to host her former boyfriend, now a famous musician, could have any connection to the original Austen novel. However, it is a fabulous adaptation. Dass wrote a love letter to Tobago, an island I knew nothing about before reading the book, with the culture soaked into every page.

Katabasis by RF Kuang (2025)

If Yellowface was insider baseball about the publishing industry, Katabasis is insider baseball about academia—exactly the sort of book I would expect Kuang to write for therapy as she works to finish her doctorate. It also feels like leveling the scales since Babel was set in Oxford and Katabasis is set at Cambridge. Kuang earned a master’s degree at each.

When Alice Law’s advisor dies a spectacularly violent death due to a miswritten magick spell, she decides to descend to hell in search of his soul because her academic career depends on having his letter of recommendation. She is joined in this quest by her colleague and competitor, Peter Murdoch. Kuang creates a vision of hell that draws from various mythologies as well as Dante’s Inferno. Filled with literary and philosophical references, as well as various paradoxes, this hefty novel is a definite love it or hate it book. But, I loved it.

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Join us on August 5th at The Cozy Library where Laura K Bray will be hosting. She has chosen the theme “Books that make you hungry.” Anything is fair game—fiction, memoir, cookbooks—the sky’s the limit.