Books - The Rough Guide to Greece - page 798

family, before their 1915 emigration to the US. The Sciakys
had close ties with Bulgarian peasants in Kukush (now
Kilkís) - and Leon is far more sympathetic to Bulgaria than
to the Greek regime which assumed control of cosmopolitan
Salonica in 1912.
Tom Stone The Summer of My Greek Taverna . Enjoyable
cautionary tale for those fantasizing about a new life in the
Aegean sun. Moving to Pátmos in the early 1980s, Stone
tries to mix friendship and business at a beach taverna,
with predictable (for onlookers anyway) results.
Richard Stoneman, ed A Literary Companion to Travel in
Greece . Ancient and medieval authors, plus Grand Tourists
- an excellent selection.
Ì Patricia Storace Dinner with Persephone . A New York
poet, resident for a year in Athens (with forays to the

provinces), puts the country's 1990s psyche on the couch.
Storace has a sly humour and an interesting take on
Greece's “imprisonment” in its imagined past.
John L. Tomkinson, ed Travellers' Greece: Memories of an
Enchanted Land . Seventeenth- to nineteenth-century
(mostly English) travellers' impressions of islands and
mainland, ranging from the enraptured to the appalled;
ideal for dipping into.
Ì Sofka Zinovieff Eurydice Street . An anthropologist
and journalist by training, Zinovieff first came to Greece in
the early 1980s, then returned in 2001 with her diplomat
husband and two daughters to live in Athens. With sharp
observations on nationalism, Orthodoxy, politics,
November 17 and leisure (to cite just a few topics), this is
the best single account of life in today's urban Greece.

FICTION
FOREIGN FICTION
Ì Louis de Bernières Captain Corelli's Mandolin . Set on
Kefaloniá during the World War II occupation and
aftermath, this accomplished 1994 tragi-comedy quickly
acquired cult, then bestseller, status in the UK and US. But
in Greece it provoked a scandal, once islanders, Greek Left
intellectuals and surviving Italian partisans woke up to its
virulent disparaging of ELAS. It seems the novel was based
on the experiences of Amos Pampaloni, an artillery captain
on Kefaloniá in 1942-44 who later joined ELAS, and who
accused De Bernières of distorting the roles of both Italians
and ELAS on the island. The Greek translation was abridged
to avoid causing offence.
Meaghan Delahunt To The Island Novel of an Australian
woman travelling with her young son to Náxos, to meet the
father she has never met, and encountering also his past, as
a political activist tortured by the junta. Not your usual
travelogue.
Oriana Fallaci A Man (o/p). Gripping tale of the junta
years, based on the author's involvement with Alekos
Panagoulis, the army officer who attempted to assassinate
Colonel Papadopoulos in 1968 - and who himself died in
mysterious circumstances in 1975.
Ì John Fowles The Magus . Fowles' biggest and best tale
of mystery and manipulation - plus Greek island life -
based on his stay on Spétses as a teacher during the 1950s.
A period piece that repays revisiting.
Victoria Hislop The Island; The Thread . The former
leper colony of Spinalonga forms the backdrop to The
Island , a huge-selling novel about a young woman
discovering her Cretan roots. A potentially good story is
marred by the cloying, derivative nature of its telling.
The Thread attempts a similar uncovering of little-known
history interwoven with family secrets, set in
Thessaloníki.
Olivia Manning The Balkan Trilogy, Volume 3: Friends and
Heroes . Wonderfully observed tale, in which Guy and

Harriet Pringle escape from Bucharest to Athens, in the last
months before the 1941 invasion.
Steven Pressfield Gates of Fire; Alexander : The Virtues of
War . Two of several Greek-set historical novels by Pressfield.
Gates of Fire , his bestselling first, is a stirring tale of the
Spartans at Thermopylae; later books, including The Virtues
of War - in which Alexander the Great recounts his warrior's
life to brother-in-law Itanes in a first-person narrative - are
rather more measured.
Evelyn Waugh Officers and Gentlemen . This second volume
of Waugh's brilliant, acerbic wartime trilogy includes an
account of the Battle of Crete and subsequent evacuation.

GREEK FICTION
Ì Apostolos Doxiadis Uncle Petros and Goldbach's
Conjecture . Uncle Petros is the disgraced family black sheep,
living reclusively in outer Athens; his nephew discovers
that Petros had staked everything to solve a theorem
unsolved for centuries. Math-phobes take heart; it's more a
meditation on how best to spend life, and what really
constitutes success.
Vangelis Hatziyannidis Hatziyannidis' abiding obsessions
- confinement, blackmail, abrupt disappearances - get a
workout in his creepy debut novel Four Walls , set on an
unspecified east Aegean isle, where a reclusive landowner
takes in a fugitive woman who convinces him to revive his
father's honey trade - with unexpected consequences. His
next novel, Stolen Time , revisits the same themes as an
impoverished student gets a tidy fee from a mysterious
tribunal for agreeing to spend two weeks in the Hotel
from Hell.
Ì Panos Karnezis Karnezis has become the most
accessible, and feted, Greek writer since the millennium.
He grew up in Greece but now lives in London, writing in
English; however, his concerns remain utterly Greek. Little
Infamies is a collection of short stories set in his native
Peloponnese during the late 1950s and early 1960s; The