Greece

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.

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

Athens hides a secret in its streets, on its buildings… in its monuments. And in an attempt to save her life, and the life of those she loves, Ariadne will have to discover the secrets her city hides, but also those her family has kept covered for so long…

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.

Iggulden draws the Greek world convincingly and he is strongest writing battle scenes' THE TIMES on the Golden Age series'The sights, sounds and smells of Athens bring history to life with gripping brilliance' DAILY MIRROR___________THE GOLDEN AGE OF ATHENS:THE JEWEL IN THE GREEK EMPIREStanding like a colossus over the city is Pericles:politician, general, architect of the city’s fortunes. Yet some look on jewels with envy. Forever a threat from the south,Sparta will not kneel to its rival. From their ranks rises a young boy– ruthless, courageous, hungry. Soon he will lead them . . . Pericles is no longer young. His city is divided – against the Spartan threat, against him. Can Athens’ most famous son rouse its citizens to war?Will the Lion of Athens roar one final time?------------Praise for the Golden Age Series'Pacy and propulsive. Crackling with energy, violence and stirring speeches' DAILY MAIL'Iggulden draws the Greek world convincingly' THE TIMES'The master historical storyteller. This swords-and-sandals epic brings the ancient world to life' DAILY EXPRESS___________Praise for Conn Iggulden'Pacy and propulsive, cracking with energy, violence and stirring speeches, Iggulden chronicles power struggles, political machinations and the bloodthirsty ravages of up-close combat' DAILY MAIL'Iggulden tells an absolutely cracking story .

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.

In this enchanting and moving memoir, Leon Sciaky describes his childhood before the FirstWorld War in a prosperous, loving Jewish family in the cosmopolitan city of Salonica (nowThessaloniki in Greece). Under the Ottoman Empire, the city's diverse communities - Jews,Muslim Turks, Orthodox Greeks and Bulgarians - met, traded and lived alongside each otherday-to-day in an atmosphere of tolerance.Farewell to Salonica offers a fascinating insight into a lost society in which an older tradition ofmutual respect was finally overcome by the pressures of nationalism and war, the after-effects ofwhich are felt in the region to this day.

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.