Grèce

'Wonderful history, adventure and a heart-breaking love story are brought thrillingly to life' - Kate Mosse 'A dramatic read from the very outset' - Simon Scarrow DESTINY, INHERITANCE, THE WORLD SHIFTING FROM EAST TO WEST. THIS IS AN EPIC NOVEL SET IN AN AGE OF DRAMATIC CHANGE. Siward, scion of a great dynasty, commands the Varangian Guard and has vowed to defend the Roman Empire to the last. Makkim, renowned general to Ottoman rule, has vowed to destroy it. They are enemies in war, but unknown to them, they are also rivals to inherit one of Europe's greatest fortunes. Even worse, they are competing for the love of the same woman. Their vast inheritance lies in Venice, as does the famous courtesan they both love. She is the reason they will find themselves fighting on the walls of Constantinople, in one of the most dramatic sieges in history.

Derided and maligned more than any other Greek artist for his innovative and, at the time, often incomprehensible modernist experiments, Engonopoulos is today justifiably regarded as one of the most original artists of his generation and as a unique figure in Greek letters. Though he considered himself first a painter and only afterwards a poet, his poetry is widely read and admired, with many critical studies of his work appearing in recent years and with a growing recognition of its value and of its creative use of the Greek tradition and language. He enriched post-war Greek poetry with a host of poetic expressions, figures and images that have come to constitute part of the Greek poetic consciousness. In both his painting and poetry, he created a peculiarly Greek surrealism, a blending of the Dionysian and Apollonian, though always in keeping with basic surrealist tenets and, as such, his work is an important and original contribution not only to Modern Greek art and poetry but also to modern art and poetry worldwide.

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERCartes Postales from Greece is an extraordinary new book from Victoria Hislop, the Sunday Times Number One bestselling author of The Island, The Return, The Thread, and The Sunrise. It is fiction in full colour - magical and unique.'Hislop's passionate love of the country breathes from every page' Daily Mail Week after week, the postcards arrive, addressed to a name Ellie does not know, with no return address, each signed with an initial: A.With their bright skies, blue seas and alluring images of Greece, these cartes postales brighten her life. After six months, to her disappointment, they cease. But the montage she has created on the wall of her flat has cast a spell. She must see this country for herself. On the morning Ellie leaves for Athens, a notebook arrives. Its pages tell the story of a man's odyssey through Greece. Moving, surprising and sometimes dark, A's tale unfolds with the discovery not only of a culture but also of a desire to live life to the full once more. Beloved, bestselling author Victoria Hislop's Cartes Postales from Greece is fiction illustrated with photographs that make this journey around Greece, already alive in the imagination, linger forever in the mind.

The Greek peasants, who plan to enact the life of Christ in a mystery play, are overwhelmed by their task. They try to identify themselves with the parts they have been given; and when a group of refugees, fleeing from the ruins of their plundered homes, reaches the village hoping to find protection, the drama of the Passion becomes reality.

In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens the gods, she is banished to the island of Aiaia where she hones her occult craft, casting spells, gathering strange herbs and taming wild beasts. Yet a woman who stands alone will never be left in peace for long - and among her island's guests is an unexpected visitor: the mortal Odysseus, for whom Circe will risk everything.

At the heart of Codename Xenophopn is the Greek nation: its history, culture and current predicament. We see a dysfunctional society through the eyes of George Zafiris, an Athens based private investigator. A thoughtful loner, he is forced to probe the heart of a failing society as he investigates a series of crimes the police show no interest in solving. A distinguished professor of ancient history is shot dead. Then a politician dies in mysterious circumstances and a journalist is murdered. George Zafiris has to find out if these deaths are connected. A gang of Georgian thugs may know the answer. Leo Kanaris has written a thoughtful crime mystery and has created a private investigator the Greek nation can be proud of.

Who was Alexius Comnenus who would wage war in East and West to save Byzantium from the edge of the abyss? Who were the woman who loved him? Who was it who tried to poison him? Why did his daughter, Anna Comnena, hate her brother, John, the co-Emperor? Why did his wife, Irene Duca, promote Nicephorus Bryennius for the throne? People and events; failures, tears and sorrows, hopes, visions that faded, joys evaporated, meanness and passion. "Come Forth, King" attempts to revive the final glimmer of Byzantium and to take us back on a journey to those difficult years through the narrative of an insignificant palace member who, now retired to Sinope in Pontus, recalls the past with awe.

George Seferis is the great Greek poet of the twentieth century, a classic among classics. The formal and thematic versatility of his work, its decisively modern inflections, call Eliot's poems to mind: fastidious and expansive in equal measure. Like Eliot's deep-rooted Modernism, Seferis's never loses touch with the stones and inscriptions of the past. He writes for his and our time, poetically and politically alert: culture can free us or, misapplied, can trammel us. Aptly described as 'the unlocker of ancient stones and sea voyages', Seferis was for Peter Levi 'one of the greatest writers in this century in any language... From Seferis it was possible to learn... what seriousness about poetry is.' And Archibald MacLeish wrote, 'if any contemporary poet can be said to be essential, Seferis is that poet, and this' - referring to an earlier edition of this book - 'is the true body of his work'.

THESSALONIKI: the crossroads between East and West… And in the turbulent, trouble- torn 20th century the city in which four lives cross, directly or indirectly…
Nikos Bakolas tells how ordinary men and women struggled to survive during a period of Greek history- roughly from the 1930s to the late 1940s- marked by oppression and violence and political polarities: the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas, the German Occupation, the Civil War. Against this backgound Fotis, jack-of-all-trades and adventurer, Christos, struggling journalist, Yannis, ambiguous scion of a well-to-do family, and Angela, orphan refugee from Asia Minor,-as well as Fotis’s son and Christos’s three children –grow to maturity and taste both sweetness and pain.
 Interspersed between the chapters of this 20th century story is an imaginative and impressionistic recreation of a period of turbulence that occurred in Thessaloniki 600 years earlier- the Zealots’ uprising of the 1340s.

Characters, events and a bittersweet love story in the Middle Ages closely parallel those of the more recent past.
Finally, to complete this complex interweaving of history and fiction, the footnotes provide a third dimension: fact, in the form of personal memories.
Crossroads describes a time of cruelty, suffering and violence, yet with its compassionate tone the novel is a quiet celebration of the courage and endurance of the human spirit.

Dangerous Days is both a state of the nation novel and a thoughtful and engaging crime novel. It is the third adventure for private investigator George Zafiris in crisis-torn Greece. It shines a light on the most secret and closely guarded sanctuary of Greek life - the family. While the State lurches between dysfunction and bankruptcy, blood relations turn to each other for support. Debts are written off, misdemeanours forgiven, jobs found for unemployables. But if charity begins at home, it also ends there. Networks of obligation bind people so tight they can never escape. Jealousy runs rampant. Nepotism keeps talent suppressed. Crime and corruption are buried in silence. While solving other people s problems Private Investigator George Zafiris gets more deeply entangled in his own. When the offer of work arrives from a polluted family source, he is forced to make an impossible choice between poverty and collusion in crime. Both the previous novels, Codename Xenophon and Blood & Gold have received great praise in the UK, US and in Germany and Dangerous Days will take this crime series on to a new level. 'With this, his second novel, Kanaris has advanced to a five-star rating.' Barry Turner in The Daily Mail ' This series is an intelligent, engrossing treat.' Mike Parker in Tribune ' we need more cracking good crime stories like this one, to entertain, illuminate, and inform.' Georgia de Chamberet in Book Blast