CRETE & SPINALONGA – 
HYDRA – 
LESBOS (LESVOS) – 
ATHENS – 
CORFU – Novel set mainly in ABRUZZO
TripFiction armchair travel by book – GREECE
9th June 2020
TripFiction armchair book travel – Greece.
Lockdown may be easing, but it will be a while before we’re allowed to travel as freely as we have before. TripFiction is here to help you travel vicariously through books with a strong sense of place. The TripFiction team have been trawling through their database of thousands of books – novels, memoirs and travelogues – and hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve dug up.
GREECE
We have more than 250 books set in Greece. Check out our Great Books Map for some top 5 or 10 literary wanderlust suggestions around the world, but here are a few ideas to get you exploring Greece with a book…
CRETE & SPINALONGA – The Island by Victoria Hislop
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding longs to find out about her mother’s past. But Sofia has never spoken of it. All she admits to is growing up in a small Cretan village before moving to London.
When Alexis decides to visit Crete, however, Sofia giver her daughter a letter to take to an old friend, and promises that through her she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone’s throw from the tiny, deserted island of Spinalonga – Greece’s former Leper Colony. Then she finds Fotini, and at last hears the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war and passion. She discovers how intimately she is connected with the island, and how secredy holds them all in a powerful grip….
HYDRA – A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson
1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen.
Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.
Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.
LESBOS (LESVOS) – The White Sea by Paul Johnston
Wealthy ship-owner Kostas Gatsos has been missing for several weeks, having been snatched from his luxury villa on the idyllic island of Lesvos. Curiously, there has been no ransom demand. When the police investigation stalls, the desperate Gatsos family turn to private investigator Alex Mavros for help.
Inherently suspicious of the super-rich and initially reluctant to take on the case, Mavros finds himself dealing with a highly dysfunctional family with more than a few skeletons in its closet, a family whose tentacles have a surprisingly wide reach. Alex believes the key to the mystery lies in the ship-owner’s shady past and sinister business deals – but the truth behind the kidnapping is more disturbing, and closer to home, than Mavros could ever have imagined.
ATHENS – The House on Paradise Street by Sofka Zinovieff
When Maud learns that her husband has been killed in a car accident, she is left bereft and bewildered. She has no idea why he was driving on a lonely coastal road outside Athens in the middle of the night.
But Nikitas was a man with a complicated history. With the return of his mother, Antigone, to the old family home on Paradise Street, Maud is given an opportunity to investigate her husband’s past. She will discover a heartbreaking story of a young mother caught up in the political tides of the Greek Civil War and forced to make a terrible decision that will blight not only her life but that of future generations.
The House on Paradise Street is an epic tale of our times. Taking the reader from the war-torn streets of 1940s Athens to the partisans’ mountain caves after the war, through the ‘Regime of the Colonels’ and on into the present day, this is a sweeping tale of love and loss, and what happens when ideology threatens to subsume our sense of humanity.
CORFU – The Greek for Love by James Chatto
The two-line ad in the Sunday Times advertising Villa Parginos in Corfu conjured an image of long afternoons drinking wine on a marble patio shaded by a grape arbour, looking out over an impossibly blue Greek sea. Instead James Chatto and his wife Wendy got a little pink bungalow with linoleum, a buzzing fluorescent light and a patio separated from the village’s main street by a wire fence.
Yet Corfu delivered so much more than their wildest fantasy had suggested. There was the intoxicating warmth of the sun, walks along sage-bordered byways, and swimming naked off an idyllic beach. There were olive trees that dropped their fruit into nets, as well as fresh apricots, grilled sardines, marinated lamb and long evenings of storytelling at the local taverna.
The couple arrived as young tourists, new to each other and in love, and were captivated by the way the islanders embraced them. It was their deep connection to Corfu and its people that later sustained them through the darkest tragedy, just as it had carried them into the most wonderful love.
We hope these books set in GREECE help you escape for a little while. Let us know what other places you’ve heard of – or visited – in Greece, and check out our database for any books set there.
The TripFiction Team
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