Here at Goodreads World Headquarters, we like to think that all of our book roundups and recommendation articles are fun. And they are! Indubitably! But some are juuuuuust a little extra fun.
 
This is one of those. Below, we've gathered up 48 new and upcoming retellings: books that take old classic stories (or myths or fairy tales or plays) and transport them into wild and wonderful new territories. 
 
Retellings is typically the term used for these kinds of books, but often they’re more like reimaginings, extended riffs, or wholesale transformations. These stories might shift the POV to another character or modernize the time frame of an older tale or change its genre entirely. For instance, Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead moves the action from Victorian-era England to contemporary Appalachia, while Julia Armfield’s upcoming Private Rites retells Shakespeare’s King Lear in the mode of queer literary horror.
 
A few notes: We’ve trimmed the list a bit by excluding any books that are based on Greek mythology. There are an awful lot of those—enough to populate several separate roundups, in fact. We've also focused on books published since 2022 and included both adult and YA titles. Below each book title, we’ve indicated the name of the older story that’s being retold. Finally, we’ve added a bonus section at the end of the list for additional retellings being published later this year.
 
Click on the book cover images for more details about each title. If anything looks promising, click the Want to Read button to add it to your personal shelf.