Κοινότητα Αναγνωστών Βιβλίων - readers.gr

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 tell how ordinary men and women struggled to survive during a period of Greek history -roughly from tthe 1930s to the late 1940- marked by oppression and violence and political polarities: the fascist dictatorship of Metaxas, the german occupation, the civil war. Against this backround Fotis, jack-of all-trades and adventurer, Christos, struggling journalist, Yannis, ambiguous son of a well-to-do f...

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.

My father, thunderstruck, was demanding to know: "But when? This is madness! Impossible." When ar fasf he replaces the receiver in a grand Shakespearean manner - my father has it in the blood - he broke the news to us: Dictatorship. My mother cried out and collapsed in a heap on the sofa. Calliope the maid, as part of her duties, always manages to sense the right moment for a restorative coffee, and set off for the kitchen. My father repeated: "Dictatorship, do you hear!" I stared at him, shaking off sleep. This is how Myrsini Panayotou, an Athenian girl about to star...

Nitsa Gazeles is a young Athenian girl from a good family – a sensitive creature with all the ardour of youth, the curiosity of innocent girlhood and the joy of life. She wants to be able to go out on her own, to go wherever she likes, to go around with whoever she likes and to come home at whatever time she likes. Nitsa goes contrary to the society of her day and we know that society, even if it is defeated and altered by people demanding change, takes its revenge on them.

Had I a sixteen-year-old daughter I would contrive to have her read this book in secret. This achieved, I would be quite easy in my mind that there would be no fear of her ever going wrong. Gr. Xenopoulos

The scene is Paris, sometime after the 1967 military coup in Greece. Eleni, together with a group of her friends and fellow political exiles, finds herself working as an extra in a French film: The Horror Train. It is not the first time Eleni has been caught up in a deadly drama, nor is it her first ride on a "horror train." As the director waves his arms, shouting directions and re-shouting the sequence, Eleni's mind wanders to her first train ride: "Athens-Piraeus. My first big trip by train. - You're Eleni? I'm Achilles. They don't ask which Achilles. One name is enough...

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 conve...

Beginning with the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp by the Americans and continuing through the months that followed before the prisoners were repatriated, lakovos Kambanellis' Mauthausen tells the story of a remarkable love affair between two former prisoners. The events of the story are all true, but they read like a strange fairy-tale. The euphoria of the first days of the Liberation, the slow awakening of the inmates to the possibilities of love and normalcy, the beauty of the spring landscape in which the lovers walk hand-in-hand make the atrocities that pre...

Andreas Franghias' novel "The Courtyard" gives us a picture of Athens not found in the guidebooks. Set in the ruins of post-World War II Greece, the story revolves around the inhabitants of a single courtyard in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods. Officially, the civil war has been over for years, but its devastating effects continue to haunt the survivors as, driven by fear, hunger and greed, they try to wrangle a way out of their poverty and pent-up lives. We follow them as they scheme and pursue their dreams through the backstreets of Monastiraki and the coffeehou...

In his brilliantly constructed novel, Spiros Plaskovitis counterpoints his enigmatic heroine -Anghelina Dassiou- agianst the touristic "development" (or destruction?) of most Greek islands today. Anghelina, although forced by circumstances to work as a sales-lady in the deluxe tourist hotel, still personifies nostalgia for the traditional couleur locale of Corfu -particularly the old Venetian town. The big buisness explotation of the island is represended by Nikias Zavolis, the odious manager of the hotel, where the hero -Dimos Hairetis- is spending his holiday with his...

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 a...

[...]Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in Greece; their first loves, lies, and secrets; their shared childhood exrperiences and their gradual growing apart. Maria, is the oldest, is strong, sensual, keenly aware of society's expectations. Infanta is beautiful, fiercely proud, aloof. Katerina is spirited, indipendent, off in a dream world of her own. There is also the mysterious Polish grandmother, the wily Camptain Andreas, the self-involved Laoura Parigori... Katerina tells the story of these intertwined lives with imagination, humor, deep tenderness,...

They're the gang that can't shoot straight: tough-guy wannabes straight out of a Greek-subtitled version of Thieves Like Us, downmarket motorcycle punks (no Hell's angels these), dead-end kids from the urban depths with foulmouthed girlfriends and parents as remote as prosperity. Innocents with attitude. Stamati, the bumbling ringleader, his faithful side-kick Takouli, and Foti, a self-styled strong, silent type who falls for a horny journalist, form a threesome with no past, no future, and a present as insouciant and short-lived as a cicada. Armed with little more than...

Two friends trapped in adolescence. Their first encounter with Woman and the supernatural. Constant reassessment of values and a heroine out of Lewis Carroll. Arrangements to meet at night at her parents' house. Reading Albert Camus and caviar-parties for four. The Dawn Spirits and the fugitive abbot. An apparition from Hell. The golden decade of the 1970s and the nymphomaniac chimera. Long live virgins! In order words, a very tender love story. Or, The Emptiness Beyond

A story of the passion between a man of fifty "plus" and a girl of nineteen, a seemingly not unusual situation were it not for the fact that everything that takes place between the two "protagonists* is constantly and faithfully recorded by someone: the mature "grey" woman who is the man's past and who chronicles the lovers' passion with adoration and respect. The place is Salonica, the Old Curiosity Shop, Africa and the prevailing element is Passion, destructive, merciless, rapacious, without inhibitions and "objections" until the End. This End which is their life in a sta...

Newlyweds arrive at an old hotel where they are to spend their honeymoon. But someone is conspiring against their life and their happiness. Death lies in wait at every turn. The hotel is occupied only by the newlyweds, the elderly owners and their strange son. Just how will this all end? Will the newlyweds escape the clutches of the crazed killer and fulfill the rosy expectations of their life? A man sentenced to life is released from prison and immediately hired as a servant by an extemely rich woman; he settles in her mansion but with misgivings. This enormous place is...