Ελλάδα

One woman returns to the island that changed her life forever

A-list actress Shauna Jackson has the perfect life. Fame, fortune, marriage. Or so it seems.

Running from a scandal, Shauna flees to the place that changed her life twenty years ago, the idyllic Greek island of Ithos.

Captivated once more by the azure seas and scented olive groves, bittersweet memories resurface of one summer, one unforgettable man, and a long-hidden secret.

Shauna can escape Hollywood, but can she escape her past?

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 contagius. Starting wtith the narrator, who has doubts about his own indetity 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 clandestinity; finally it reaches the very frontiers of paranoia to refect starkly all the incoherence and derisiveness of the late twentieth century. [...]

In 1945 the horror film Isle of the Dead, directed by Mark Robson and starring Boris Karloff, the celebrated Frankenstein of the big screen, introduced the figure of Vrykolakas to cinema audiences, a kind of Greek vampire whose existence and survival, unlike that of his Slavic “cousin”, is less dependent on the consumption of his victims’ blood. The Vrykolakas is active not only at night and can contaminate hearths and homes with its presence. Despite being lumped in with the most famous of vampires with the status of a suspended existence between “undead” and “unliving”, it is in fact more like a hybrid between the god Pan, the harpies and the lamiae of classical antiquity, and sheds light on a little known aspect of age-old Greek folklore: its monstrous disturbing character decidedly in contrast with the exclusively Apollonian image that is often held dear by foreign observers. The Vrykolakas presents itself to the reader in the stories included in this collection in all its terrible power and violence, putting the orderly world of the living to the test. Or perhaps of the living they are a distorting, an aspect that is as true as it is occult? An opportunity to reflect and lose ourselves in the power of great literature, which once again shows us the ideal key to gain access to our souls.

Here is the portrait of an extraordinary - yet in many ways typical - English couple, as seen through the eyes of a fascinated, ouzo-guzzling Greek narrator reminiscing on a sundrenched beach. Under his passionate, yet humorous, scrutiny, Mrs. Freeman and her husband come alive with great vividness, all the while retaining intact the mystery of their "otherness." The book is much more than the story of Mrs. Freeman's life and times; it also offers an ironical insight into the confrontation of two cultures, two different ways of looking at the world.

We are sad creatures. I am a prostitute running to seed and my last asset is an idiot son. I am a street-sweeper collapsing under the weight of time and my own obesity. I am a foul-mouthed and repellent daughter desperately in need of a man. Sad creatures. Simple needs. Mr. Dimitriou conjures us into existence in the space of a few lines, and we live, poised between hope and its extinction, for a few brief pages in the harsh world of his pared down prose. Sad creatures, dumb creatures: our spokesman ultimately is a dead or dying dog... woof, woof, dear Lord.

This moving fable sees a young Greek writer set out to Crete to claim a small inheritance. But when he arrives, he meets Alexis Zorba, a middle-aged Greek man with a zest for life. Zorba has had a family and many lovers, has fought in the Balkan wars, has lived and loved - he is a simple but deep man who lives every moment fully and without shame.

As their friendship develops, he is gradually won over, transformed and inspired along with the reader. Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis' most popular and enduring novel, has its origins in the author's own experiences in the Peleponnesus in the 1920s. His swashbuckling hero has legions of fans across the world and his adventures are as exhilarating now as they were on first publication in the 1950s.

'There can never be any doubt that Kazantzakis was the possessor of genius.' Sunday Telegraph