Seven books by writers from Greece, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Zorba the Greek and Fratricides.
Greece's literature runs from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey to two Nobel laureates, Giorgos Seferis in 1963 and Odysseas Elytis in 1979. Dionysios Solomos, regarded as the national poet, wrote the Hymn to Liberty in 1823, and its opening stanzas became the national anthem. The Ottoman centuries, refugees from Asia Minor and the Civil War recur in later prose.
Nikos Kazantzakis's Zorba the Greek, translated from Greek, pairs a bookish narrator with the exuberant labourer Zorba as they reopen a lignite mine on Crete's coast, while his Christ Recrucified is set in an Anatolian Greek village under Ottoman rule. Stratis Myrivilis drew on the Macedonian front in Life in the Tomb, a raw, unsentimental account of a soldier's First World War. Nicholas Gage's Eleni, by a Greek-American journalist, reconstructs his mother's execution in an Epirus village during the Civil War.
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A Cretan labourer's philosophy of life, set among mining villagers on Crete's coast, captures island passion, poverty and the Greek spirit.
The Greek Civil War divides a mountain village and its priest, showing how ideology tore apart families and communities.
Set in an Anatolian Greek village under Ottoman rule, it explores Orthodox faith, refugee suffering and communal hypocrisy.
Kazantzakis's autobiographical account traces his Cretan childhood, travels through Greece and spiritual searching across turbulent early twentieth-century history.
A Greek soldier's Macedonian front experience in the First World War, rendered in raw, unsentimental detail.
A Lesbos village story of the 1920s, with refugees from Asia Minor and the island's folk religion and landscape.
A Greek-American journalist reconstructs his mother's execution in a Epirus village during the Civil War and his search for justice.
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