Retellings of classic novels are having a bit of a moment: both Sandra Newman’s feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia, and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-winning modernised David Copperfield, Demon Copperhead have made a splash in the last couple of years, while Percival Everett’s reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James, will hit bookshops in April.
If each work of art builds on what came before it, the novels below take indebtedness to the next level. With riffs and rewritings, playful challenges and prequels, these writers re-imagine the stories that inspired them – and allow us to rethink the idea of novelty itself. After all, as WH Auden puts it, our belief in our own “uniqueness” is “absolutely banal”.
