Grèce

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

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.

**The spellbinding new retelling of the Trojan War drawn from the perspective of the fearless women at the heart of it all.**'The story and its characters swept me up and engulfed me, I could not put this one down' REAL READER REVIEW'I was glued to it from beginning to end and could not wait to recommend to my friends afterwards.' REAL READER REVIEW'Jennifer Saint has breathed new life into this myth and put her own stamp on it' REAL READER REVIEW'A brilliant read' Women & Home | 'A spirited retelling' Times | 'Beautiful and absorbing' Fabulous | 'A vivid reimagining of Greek mythology' Harper's Bazaar | 'Jennifer Saint has done an incredible job' RedThe House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse, and the fickle nature of men and gods.

ClytemnestraThe sister of Helen, wife of Agamemnon - her hopes of averting the curse are dashed when her sister is taken to Troy by the feckless Paris. Her husband raises a great army against them and determines to win, whatever the cost. CassandraPrincess of Troy, and cursed by Apollo to see the future but never to be believed when she speaks of it.

She is powerless in her knowledge that the city will fall. ElektraThe youngest daughter of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, Elektra is horrified by the bloodletting of her kin. But can she escape the curse, or is her own destiny also bound by violence?Praise for Jennifer Saint and ARIADNE:'A lyrical, insightful re-telling' Daily Mail'Relevant and revelatory' Stylist'Energetic and compelling' Times'An illuminating read' Woman & Home'A story that's impossible to forget' Culturefly

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.

Alexander's beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son's loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle's tutoring provoked his mind and Homer's Iliad fuelled his aspirations. Killing his first man in battle at the age of twelve, he became regent at sixteen and commander of Macedon's cavalry at eighteen, so that by the time his father was murdered, Alexander's skills had grown to match his fiery ambition.

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.