KOULA
A "brief encounter" on the Athenian Underground brings together two people, Koula and Dimitris, from entirely different backgrounds and ages. For a few weeks they manage to break loose from their respective shackles and meet in a kind of no man's land of passionate discovery. The couple's emotional fluctuations are charted with remarkable precision and subtlety, in a low-key tone that fully captures the muted drama of their meeting and parting. (From the publisher)...
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MARIOS HAKKAS: HEROES' SHRINE FOR SALE
"Kesariani, once you were a star; for a moment you shone in the firmament and then, you vanished for ever into the void of history... There's nothing left. Now you're plastering the last traces of gunshots on your forehead, like an old dog licking its wounds, where the scar has healed." Marios Hakkas lived almost all his tragically short life close to the Athenian neighbourhood of Kesariani, in the shadow of Mount Hymettos. Throughout the Nazi Occupation of Greece, this district was the symbol of Greek Resistance and Hakkas' stories are in...
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FOOL'S GOLD
My father, thunderstruck, was demanding to know: "But when? This is madness! Impossible." When at last 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, a...
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THE JOY IS IN THE JOURNEY (MODERN GREEK WRITERS)
This "healing" book plunges the reader in a world full of sea, colours, light and cool breeze that portray the many facets of Greek life, and at the same time gives simple, every day, apparently unimportant facts their real value. "Whoever derives pleasure from small things always wins the lottery in life", says the aged heroine who, born in the midst of the Smyrna Disaster of 1922, was rescued from the flames and brought to live in one of the Aegean islands where she found a second home and a loving family. As she spins out for us the dif...
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REFUGEE CAPITAL
[...] In the prose pieces and essays that make up Refugee Capital their story is told, often through the eyes of an adolescent narrator recreated by a writer at the peak of his powers. Yorgos Ioannou sets out to rescue the enduring from the clutches of the ephemeral, to reconcile the irreconcilable, to harmonize the discordant. So he does. And brings an entire city, and its inhabitants, to life in all their fractious diversity. (From the publisher)...
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FAREWELL ANATOLIA
"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 ...
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VANISHING POINT
In this story Aristotelis Nikolaidis, psychiatrist and prolific novelist and poet, relates how a certain individual slowly vanishes from view, a process that becomes strangely contagious. Starting with the narrator, who has doubts about his own identity and even the reality of his thoughts and memories, the contagion spreads to other characters and to the narrator itself. The hero's odyssey is a decent into hell in which reality becomes a snare trapping the wanderer in the state of absolute clandestinely; finally it reaches the very fronti...
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THE CICADAS
They're the gang that can't shoot straight: tough-guy wannabes straight out of a Greek-subtitled version of ''Thieves like us'', down-market 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, from a threesome with no past, no future, and a present as insouciant and short-lived as a...
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COME FORTH, KING
Who was Alexius Comnenus who would wage war in East and West to save Byzantium from the edge of the abyss? Who were the women 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 that evaporated, meanness and passion. "Come Forth, King" attempts to revive the final glimmer of Byzantium and to take us back on a jour...
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MISSION BOX
Symbolically powerful, incisively poetic, "Mission Box" is a Kafkaesque Odyssey of yearning and disillusionment, aspiration and despair, which placed Aris Alexandrou at the forefront of Greek fiction in our time. Alexandrou's presence in contemporary Greek letters was strongly felt in his distinguished translations of poetry and fiction from Russian, French and English, in his powerful verse, and finally - in the capstone of his career - the remarkable novel, "Mission Box (Το kivotio, 1974)"...
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MOTHER THESSALONIKI
Α nice book this about the mother city. It consists of pieces written by Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis. Most modern of Greek writers, most distinctly Greek, Pentzikis assembles his pieces so that, beginning in alienation, with the recalcitrance and transience of things, the casual cruelties of space and time, they reach out, through the luminous Orthodox immanences of the past, the reverberations of historical memory, towards an inclusive density of present experience. And the wonder lies, the beauty, in the way that we sense, looming in the end...
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ICONOSTASIS OF ANONYMOUS SAINTS (VOLUME 2)
This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? - everyday people from Ritsos' ne...
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GIOCONDA
A love born during the years of the Occupation reaches a peak of intensity. As the two young people grow up, in love, thousands of people are dying of hunger, the innocent are being tortured and patriots executed. Love does not triumph, however, but is brought to an end. The Germans begin to round up the Jews, including Gioconda ... A true story, of one of the most beautiful but tragic adolescent experiences. (From the publisher)...
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DRIFTING CITIES
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 ...
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ICONOSTASIS OF ANONYMOUS SAINTS (VOLUME 3)
This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings?-everyday people from Ritsos' neigh...
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TWO THRILLERS
Newlyweds arrive at an old hotel where they are to spend their honeymoon. But someone is conspiring against their life and their happiness. Death lies in wait at every turn. The hotel is occupied only by the newlyweds, the elderly owners and their strange son. Just how will this all end? Will the newlyweds escape the clutches of the crazed killer and fulfill the rosy expectations of their life? A man sentenced to life is released from prison and immediately hired as a servant by an extremely rich woman; he settles in her mansion but with m...
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MAUTHAUSEN
Beginning with the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp by the Americans and continuing through the months that followed before the prisoners were repatriated, lakovos Kambanellis' Mauthausen tells the story of a remarkable love affair between two former prisoners. The events of the story are all true, but they read like a strange fairy-tale. The euphoria of the first days of the Liberation, the slow awakening of the inmates to the possibilities of love and normalcy, the beauty of the spring landscape in which the lovers walk hand-i...
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THREE SUMMERS
«That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria's had cherries around the rim, Infanta's had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one...» "Three Summers" is the story of three sisters growing up in Greece; their first loves, lies, and secrets; their shared childhood experiences and their gradual growing apart. Maria, the oldest, is strong, sensual, keenly aware of society's expectations. Infanta is beautiful, fiercely proud,...
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THE COURTYARD
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...
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ΤΗΕ ΕΜΡΤΙΝΕSS ΒΕΥΟΝD
Two friends trapped in adolescence. Their first encounter with Woman and the supernatural. Constant reassessment of values and a heroine out of Lewis Carroll. Arrangements to meet at night at her parents' house. Reading Albert Camus and caviar-parties for four. The Dawn Spirits and the fugitive abbot. An apparition from Hell. The golden decade of the 1970s and the nymphomaniac chimera. Long live virgins! In order words, a very tender love story. Or, The Emptiness Beyond. (From the publisher)...
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