The 3000-year-old book Australians suddenly can’t get enough of

Readers are clamouring to set sail with The Odyssey, propelling Homer’s epic to the No.1 spot on Australia’s bestseller charts and clearing shelves in its wake, in a remarkable resurgence for the nearly 3000-year-old poem.

The epic’s siren call is proving hard to resist: stock is disappearing fast, audiobook downloads are surging and library waitlists are stretching into the triple digits. Even graphic novels and puzzle adaptations are being snapped up as Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film sends audiences back to Homer’s tale.

The Odyssey had no presence on Australia’s bestseller lists before Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation became the highest sales-growth title in the country in the week Nolan’s film hit cinemas, according to NielsenIQ BookScan Australia data.

Now it has completed another improbable voyage, conquering the top spot on the national non-fiction chart and dethroning Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s investigation into Trump’s second presidency, which had held the No.1 spot for three weeks.

While The Odyssey – which follows the Greek hero Odysseus on a drama-filled, decade-long journey home from the Trojan War – is a work of fiction, Nielsen classifies poetry under its non-fiction literature, poetry and criticism category.

While some booksellers stocked up in anticipation of a Nolan-induced rush and still have copies of Wilson’s translation on hand, others were caught off guard by the scale of the demand.

Wiley, which distributes Wilson’s book in Australia, has emptied its local warehouse and has 20,000 copies on order from overseas, with the next shipment due in about two weeks. George Egonidis, Wiley’s trade sales and marketing director, said sales had exploded in recent weeks.

“While sales have been building ahead of the film release all year, the response in July has been phenomenal and exceeded all expectations – not just in Australia but globally,” he said. “Demand has spiked 500 per cent in the last month, so we’ve had to constantly adjust our forecasts and increase the stock we have arriving in a couple of weeks.”

Wiley expects the interest will endure beyond the movie-induced spike, anticipating another lift ahead of Christmas, followed by a further bump as the film enters awards season and the Oscars approach next year.

Wilson’s translation was already one of the most popular modern editions of The Odyssey. The first complete published English translation of the poem by a woman, it won widespread praise for capturing Homer’s verse in direct, contemporary English, while its extensive introduction and accessibility have made it a popular choice for students and first-time readers.

“We’d turn over one every couple of months. Now we have people coming in begging us, going, ‘Do you have more in store?’”

Mia Sherman, manager, The Sun Bookshop

Nolan cited Wilson’s translation as an influence on his interpretation of Odysseus – singling out her famous opening line, “Tell me about a complicated man” – but the classicist was less than impressed by his screen adaptation. Writing in the London Review of Books, she criticised the screenplay for failing to capture the original text’s nuance, saying she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script”. Her broadside triggered a literary skirmish of its own, with novelist Joyce Carol Oates accusing Wilson of adopting the “crude language of MAGA folks” in her take-down.

At Sydney’s Abbey’s Bookshop, manager Alan Abbey said monthly sales of Wilson’s translation had largely hovered in the single digits – three copies in February – before the film.

“We ran out of the Emily Wilson stock during the week and quickly got some in,” Abbey said. “You think the main rush has gone and then you turn around and you’ve sold another 10 in a day – ‘What happened there? There were a bunch on the shelves a minute ago.’”

At Melbourne’s Readings, managing director Joe Rubbo said the bookstore sold 40 times as many copies of Wilson’s translation in July as it did in the same month last year.

While surprised by the scale of interest, Rubbo said the enthusiastic response to Readings’ inaugural Big Book Club on The Odyssey had given the bookseller an early indication of what was to come, prompting it to stock up ahead of the film’s release. As a result it still has a healthy supply of copies on shelves today.

Smaller booksellers haven’t been so lucky. The Sun Bookshop in Yarraville sold out of Wilson’s translation a week ago and is waiting for fresh stock to arrive.

“We’d turn over one every couple of months. Now we have people coming in begging us, going, ‘Do you have more in store?’” manager Mia Sherman said.

While Wilson’s version may be leading the charge, editions and formats across the board are selling strongly – from Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel adaptation and Odyssey-themed puzzles to audiobooks, where Audible Australia said engagement jumped to 13 times its normal rate in July.

The queues are growing at libraries, too. A spokesperson for City of Sydney said interest had jumped significantly, reporting a 240 per cent spike in eBook loans and a 297 per cent surge in physical loans and reservations across 14 different titles and editions, compared with the same time frame prior to the the film’s release. By Friday afternoon, City of Sydney libraries had 73 reservations for Wilson’s translation, while 198 readers were waiting in line for it in Brisbane. City of Melbourne libraries have also ordered extra stock in the face of 41 holds on Wilson’s book, alongside growing waitlists for the graphic novel, audiobooks and alternative translations.

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