Grèce

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.

Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to India. After Alexander's death in 323 B.C. his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasingly undisciplined Macedonian army. Most failed and were killed in the attempt. For no one possessed the leadership to keep the great empire from crumbling. But Alexander's legend endured to spread into worlds he had seen only in dreams.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of The Song of Achilles and Circe, an enchanting short story that boldly reimagines the myth of Galatea and Pygmalion.

**A small hardback edition featuring a new afterword by Madeline Miller**

In Ancient Greece, a skilled marble sculptor has been blessed by a goddess who has given his masterpiece - the most beautiful woman the town has ever seen - the gift of life. Now his wife, he expects Galatea to please him, to be obedience and humility personified. But she has desires of her own, and yearns for independence.

In a desperate bid by her obsessive husband to keep her under control, she is locked away under the constant supervision of doctors and nurses. But with a daughter to rescue, she is determined to break free, whatever the cost...

Often compared during his lifetime to T.S. Eliot, whose work he translated and introduced to Greece, George Seferis is noted for his spare, laconic, dense and allusive verse in the Modernist idiom of the first half of the 20th century. At once intensely Greek and a cosmopolitan of his time (he was a career-diplomat as well as a poet), Seferis better than any other writer expresses the dilemma experienced by his countrymen then and now: how to be at once Greek and modern. The translations that make up this volume are the fruit of more than forty years, and many are published here for the first time. 

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.

It is the eve of the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, and Chrysovalantis—a chronically unsuccessful but enthusiastic employee of the publishing industry—has been put out of work yet again. He begins a vitriolic monologue, taking aim at his many persecutors, from cruel bosses to opportunistic women to embar­rassing, crippling illnesses. An ageing relic of a bygone era, hounded by the challenges of a fast-changing city, he nonetheless sees the irony of his plight. Vice-ridden yet God-fearing, family-loving yet swindled even by his own sisters, this repentant anti-hero will set his record straight once and for all. And God is his witness.

God's Pauper is an imaginative retelling of the life of St. Francis. Kazantzakis' writings are an anguished expression of the eternal struggle between the spirit and flesh, and he uses the story of St. Francis to draw us into the Maelstrom. The story is dramatically unfolded to us by the Saint's constant companion, Frate Leone, who takes us through agonies of physical and spiritual humiliation. We accompany the Saint before the Pope to establish his Brotherhood; to Damietta and the Saracen armies; and in solitary vigils on Mount Alvernia. The minutest and the mightiest elements of nature form the backcloth to the drama of events. Hate, compassion, jealousy and fear are among the principal ingredients in the drama, fused together with infinite subtlety.

The protagonist in each of these stories is a solitary individual, alienated from society, haunted Dy memurira, fascinated by the disgusting, obsessed with the relationship between love and death, and fetishistically attached to certain objects that bear the traces of traumatic experiences. Ioannou brilliantly highlights the discrepancy between intimate acts of sex and violence, and the way people pretend in public that life can be lived withoutphysicality. In "Good Friday Vigil"- his last book of stories before his untimely death in 1985 - Ioannou departs from the conversational tone of his earlier work and develops an intricate style whose wanderings evoke the associative meanderings of the memory.