Greece

THE ATHENIAN MURDERS is a brilliant, very entertaining and absolutely original literary mystery, revolving round two intertwined riddles. In classical Athens, one of the pupils of Plato's Academy is found dead. His idealistic teacher suspects that this wasn't an accident and asks Herakles, known as the 'Decipherer of Enigmas', to investigate the death and ultimately a dark, irrational and subversive cult. The second plot unfolds in parallel through the footnotes of the translator of the text. As he proceeds with his work, he becomes increasingly convinced that the original author has hidden a second meaning, which can be brought to light by interpreting certain repeated words and images. As the main plot and also the translation of the manuscript advances, there are certain sinister coincidences, and it seems that the text is addressing him personally and in an increasingly menacing manner... THE ATHENIAN MURDERS constitutes a highly compelling, entertaining and intelligent game about the different ways we can see and read reality, about our refusal to take things 'as they are' and our need to interpret hidden meanings into everyday life.

"The Blind Man with the Lamp", originally published in Greek in 1983, is the first English translation of a complete collection of poetry by Leivaditis. A pioneering book of prose-poems, Leivaditis here gives powerful voice to a post-war generation divested of ideologies and illusions, imbued with the pain of loss and mourning, while endlessly questing for something wholly other, indeed for the holy Other.A substantial introduction by the translator, N. N. Trakakis, situates and reviews the poet and his work within his times with special reference to this present collection.

The stories presented in this selection encompass the main and universal themes that best exemplify his work. In them he records and recreates that modern Greek experience as it was lived in its many perspectives - displacement, emigration, home-coming, estrangement, exile, attempts to reclaim lost innocence, visions of Paradise, the daily struggle for survival - and explores the souls of men and women as they succumbed to or struggled against the power of evil and dealt with life's ambiguities. Within these themes Papadiamandis also embraced the mythic past as it survived through people's belief in supernatural wonders and which animated the countryside with haunted ruins, nymphs and fairies and the sea with mermaids and Tritons. His was an authentic expression of a reality that he saw as a seamless whole in which man, whether or not he is conscious of it, spirits and the natural world all participate in a living liturgical now, ever moving towards their eternal source.

The stories included in this second volume of Alexandros Papadiamandis’s literary work were written during the years 1894–1902, a period regarded as his most creative. As the nineteenth century gives way to the twentieth, in these stories we are presented with an unrivalled gallery of authentic individuals who are emerging out of a past defined by traditional beliefs and practices while moving into a new age shaped by the challenges of modernity. Wandering dervishes, naked witches in the moonlight, a child falling in love with a hamadryad, nymphs inhabiting both sea and land, desperate lovers, graceful adolescents, stalwart rustics, seafarers, outcasts, wild revellers — figures in both country and urban landscapes with their unrequited longings, unrealistic expectations, utopian hopes, daily drudgery, often living on the edge of hope and despair, salvation and damnation, beauty and awfulness. By simply observing life around him and recording it in his unique manner he was able to capture things mysterious, inexplicable, paradoxical and contradictory, namely the inexhaustible richness of existence.

Jocasta is just fifteen when she is told that she must marry the King of Thebes, an old man she has never met. Her life has never been her own, and nor will it be, unless she outlives her strange, absent husband.

Ismene is the same age when she is attacked in the palace she calls home. Since the day of her parents' tragic deaths a decade earlier, she has always longed to feel safe with the family she still has. But with a single act of violence, all that is about to change.

With the turn of these two events, a tragedy is set in motion. But not as you know it.

They're the gang that can't shoot straight: tough-guy wannabes straight out of a Greek-subtitled version of Thieves Like Us, downmarket motorcycle punks (no Hell's angels these), dead-end kids from the urban depths with foulmouthed girlfriends and parents as remote as prosperity. Innocents with attitude. Stamati, the bumbling ringleader, his faithful side-kick Takouli, and Foti, a self-styled strong, silent type who falls for a horny journalist, form a threesome with no past, no future, and a present as insouciant and short-lived as a cicada. Armed with little more than an empty shotgun and plenty of bravado, the three blow their big chance: a hold-up at a district tax office. Their Technicolor dream comes unraveled on a furious motorcycle ride north, in a comic brawl on a deserted beach, and in the final ignominy of capture under the flashing lights of a provincial disco. Life, suggests The Cicadas, is as tough, nasty and indifferent as a B thriller. Vangelis Raptopoulos' characters, sketched with sure-handed empathy, with a knife-edged ear for the hard humor of the street, throb with the fervid intensity of cicadas buzzing in the noonday heat. Nothing in their voice intimated how soon they will die.

A new translation of a poet widely considered one of the most important of the twentieth century.

'Out of the sea, as if Homer himself had arranged it for me, the islands bobbed up, lonely, deserted, mysterious in the fading light'

Enraptured by a young woman's account of the landscapes of Greece, Henry Miller set off to explore the Grecian countryside with his friend Lawrence Durrell in 1939. In The Colossus of Maroussi he describes drinking from sacred springs, nearly being trampled to death by sheep and encountering the flamboyant Greek poet Katsumbalis, who 'could galvanize the dead with his talk'. This lyrical classic of travel writing represented an epiphany in Miller's life, and is the book he would later cite as his favourite.

'One of the five greatest travel books of all time' Pico Iyer

Andreas Franghias' novel "The Courtyard" gives us a picture of Athens not found in the guidebooks. Set in the ruins of post-World War II Greece, the story revolves around the inhabitants of a single courtyard in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. Officially, the civil war has been over for years, but its devastating effects continue to haunt the survivors as, driven by fear, hunger and greed, they try to wrangle a way out of their poverty and pent-up lives. We follow them as they scheme and pursue their dreams through the backstreets of Monastiraki and the coffeehouses of Omonia Square. There is Eftihis, a street-peddler who dreams of making it big on money from an extorted dowry. There is Lucia, the wife of a country school-teacher who returns to look for a past that no longer exists. There is Andonis, one-time resistance fighter, now small-time operator. And there is Angelos, a political fugitive on the run from himself. "The Courtyard", tells their stories with humor and drama. It is the portrait of a city rebuilding and reshaping itself; of a society torn out at the roots, suspended between the uncertainties of its future and the nightmares of its past.