Grèce

Athens, the spring of 1965. The esteemed Professor Lambrinos Andreas, one of the leading lawyers in the country and a prominent public figure, risks knocking down the young Olga Kazàsoglou with his car. The offspring of a wealthy Greek shipowner of the diaspora, Olga begins a game full of charm and ambiguities, which puts a strain on the quiet certainty of the staid professor. The discovery of the girl’s corpse in Lambrinos’ country house is a shock for him, as it is thanks to her that he was able to glimpse an alternative to his life. A few days later Olga’s stepmother, Asklipios Rena, is found murdered. The mystery deepens: who murdered the two women and why? The reader’s questions are answered by Georgios Bekas, the most famous commissioner of contemporary Greek literature, embarking on his first adventure. “In the fifties and sixties, along with Leonardo Sciascia, Yannis Marìs was one of the first authors in Europe to understand the social dimension of detective stories”. Petros Màrkaris

A revelatory collection of letters written by the author of The Broken Road.Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend. The letters in this collection span almost seventy years, the first written ten days before Paddy's twenty-fifth birthday, the last when he was ninety-four.

His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper and his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit many of his most engaging characteristics: his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving. Here are plenty of extraordinary stories: the hunt for Byron's slippers in one of the remotest regions of Greece; an ignominious dismissal from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque; hiding behind a bush to dub Dirk Bogarde into Greek during the shooting of Ill Met by Moonlight, the film based on the story of General Kreipe's abduction; his extensive travels.

Some letters contain glimpses of the great and the good, while others are included purely for the joy of the jokes.

When an Albanian husband and wife are found dead in their home, Inspector Costas Haritos, a veteran junta-trained homicide detective on the Athens police force, is called to what seems at first to be an open-and-shut case. For the Greek police, two dead Albanians are hardly a matter of concern. But when Albania's celebrity television news reporter Janna Karayoryi insists that the case was closed too early, Haritos becomes unnerved. He doesn't exactly like the ambitious young journalist, but could she be right in thinking the murder has something to do with babies? Before Haritos can find out, Janna is suddenly murdered, moments before she is to go on the air with a startling newsbreak. Did her mysterious report have something to do with the murdered Albanians? Who wanted her silenced, and why? Caught between a bumbling junior officer and higher-ups all too easily influenced by news executives determined to protect their own, Costas Haritos sets out to get to the bottom of the matter-and ends up neck deep in a dark form of capitalism that has emerged in Albania after the dictatorship.

This is the saga of three cities: Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria, three cities drifting toward chaos in a war-torn Middle East. 

At its centre is Manos: a poet, lover of life, man of intellect and integrity, and hero of the Greek war against the Italian invasion, but who now deserts the national army to join the leftists in their clandestine struggle against the Greek fascists and royalists.

Underground operations take him from city to city, involving him in a chain of shifting and perilous relationships. Manos is forced to choose between his human impulses and the brutal dictates of Communist ideology.

Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian. The whole family have to get to grips with their new life and identities: the children start school and tackle a new language, and Sofka's husband, Vassilis, comes home after half a lifetime away. Meanwhile, Sofka resolves to get to know her new city and become a Greek citizen, which turns out to be a process of Byzantine complexity. As the months go by, Sofka's discovers how memories of Athens' past haunt its present in its music, poetry and history. She also learns about the difficult art of catching a taxi, the importance of smoking, the unimportance of time-keeping, and how to get your Christmas piglet cooked at the baker's.

Farewell Anatolia is a tale of paradise lost and of shattered innocence; a tragic fresco of the fall of Hellenism in Asia Minor; a stinging indictment of Great Power politics, oil-lust and corruption. Dido Sotiriou's novel - a perennial best seller in Greece since it first appeared in 1962 - tells the story of Manolis Axiotis , a poor but resourceful villager born near the ancient ruins of Ephesus. Axiotis is a fictional protagonist and eyewitness to an authentic nightmare: Greece's "Asia Minor Catastrophe", the death or expulsion of two million Greeks from Turkey by Kemal Attaturk's revolutionary forces in the late summer of 1922. Manolis Axiotis' chronicle of personal fortitude, betrayed hope, and defeat resonates with the greater tragedy of two nations: Greece, vanquished and humiliated; Turkey, bloodily victorious. Two neighbours linked by bonds of culture and history yet diminished by mutual greed, cruelty and bloodshed.

A tale from Skiathos "Οι ελαφροΐσκιωτοι" είναι ένα χαρακτηριστικό διήγημα του Παπαδιαμάντη. Οι ήρωές του είναι γραφικοί, απλοί άνθρωποι, που ζουν ταπεινά, με τις παραδόσεις, τα ήθη και τα έθιμα αιώνων. Ο Παπαδιαμάντης τούς περιγράφει ευλαβικά αλλά και με χιούμορ. Το φυσικό τοπίο της γενέτειράς του, της Σκιάθου, αποτελεί το σκηνικό του διηγήματος. Η μεθυστική βλάστηση, οι λόφοι, οι πηγές και τα φαράγγια ήταν ιδανικοί τόποι για να φωλιάσουν οι δοξασίες και τα πνεύματα, η πίστη στο υπερφυσικό, στοιχεία που βρίσκονται βαθιά χαραγμένα στη συνείδηση των θεοσεβούμενων, κατά τα άλλα, ανθρώπων. H έκδοση περιλαμβάνει χρονολόγιο και αγγλική βιβλιογραφία για όσους θέλουν να εντρυφήσουν περισσότερο στο έργο του συγγραφέα.

My father, thunderstruck, was demanding to know: "But when? This is madness! Impossible." When ar fasf he replaces the receiver in a grand Shakespearean manner - my father has it in the blood - he broke the news to us: Dictatorship. My mother cried out and collapsed in a heap on the sofa. Calliope the maid, as part of her duties, always manages to sense the right moment for a restorative coffee, and set off for the kitchen. My father repeated: "Dictatorship, do you hear!" I stared at him, shaking off sleep. This is how Myrsini Panayotou, an Athenian girl about to start university, learns of the coup d'etat that brought to power the infamous dictatorship of the "Colonels" in her country in the early hours of Friday, 21st April 1967. The child of a well-to-do family, Myrsini enthusiastically joins the underground resistance, making common cause with a varied cast of characters from backgrounds very different from her own. After an early failed love affair, she gets engaged to George, a political prisoner, only to find her human instincts increasingly difficult to reconcile with her idealistic philosophy once he is released. The story moves towards its climax as Myrsini becomes involved in the bloody events of 17th November 1973, when tanks were used to evict students from the Athens Polytechnic. At the same time the fortunes of Myrsini's family form a backdrop at once touching and bizarre to an impressionable girl's unflinching search for a true identity, both for herself and for her country. "Fool's Gold" is a sparkling novel by a talented writer, one of the foremost of a generation which grew up in the shadow of the events Maro Douka describes.

The context is Crete in the late nineteenth century, the epic struggle between Greeks and Turks, between Christianity and Islam. A new uprising takes place to rival those of 1854, 1866 and 1878, and the island is thrown into confusion yet again. In the village of Megalokastro a Cretan resistance fighter, Captain Michales, is matched by the Turkish bey, his blood-brother. The life of the local community continues shakily, but is disrupted by explosions of violence.