By Roger Lancelyn Green
The whole of Greek mythology told as one continuous story, from the making of the world to the death of Heracles. It was written in 1958, and it's the hardest and most beautiful version here.
Roger Lancelyn Green does the one thing the other books here don't try: he takes the scattered myths and welds them into a single story that runs start to finish, the way a novel does. It opens with the Titans and the birth of Zeus, then carries straight through Prometheus, Perseus and the Gorgon, Theseus and the labyrinth, Jason and the Argonauts, and the twelve labors of Heracles. It ends with Heracles dying on his own pyre and being carried up to Olympus. Characters cross from one story into the next. Time passes. By the last page your child has read the whole age of heroes as a single arc, which is how the Greeks understood it and how almost nobody tells it now.
Green's is the version for a child whose obsession has turned into appetite. He asks a lot: long paragraphs, a big vocabulary, and a formal 1958 voice that never once winks. What he gives back is the only version here that makes the mythology hang together as one story instead of a pile of separate ones. A child who's been collecting these myths in fragments for years gets to feel the whole shape close. It's also the book Rick Riordan has said he grew up on, and the current Puffin edition carries his introduction, which is worth mentioning to a child who arrived through Percy Jackson and needs a reason to try something written sixty-odd years before they were born.