Κοινότητα Αναγνωστών Βιβλίων - readers.gr

The Spartans may be thought of as the Samurais of the Western World. They led a frugal life, trained daily for battle and war, and sought to attain knowledge and divinity through a frugal and abstinent life. This book does not intend to provide a "description" of the Spartans, but walk with them, in an esoteric way, to the endless pursuit of virtue, a virtue that leads to a transcendent mortal world. The "vehicle" for this course is provided by an event mentioned by Herodotus, the "father of history". It is known through Herodotus that the Spartans at Thermopylae were s...

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...

Set in 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..."

"...on the island of Atlantis there was a great and incredible empire..." (Plato: Timaeus) What could cosmopolitan Santorini and the lost Atlantis possibly have in common? Two stories separated by thousands of years, but drawn together by something much greater. A discovery made on Santorini today could potentially change the history of the human race for ever. On this same island three and a half thousand years ago, a desperate struggle took place in legendary Atlantis; a struggle to save a people and a civilisation. The two stories and their characters run a parall...

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...

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...

[...] I went out to buy something. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon. Near Taksim Square I saw a large crowd of furious Turks screaming slogans like "Cyprus is Turkish, down with the infidels" and more. I was very scared and I decided to go back home quickly and report it to Mr. Theophilos. He was very upset when he heard. He tried to reach Christos or Vassilis in Athens on the phone, but he could not get a connection. In the meantime there were very loud screams and a sound of people running and screaming near our house. Mr. Theophilos became even more excited, he...

This is the saga of three cities: Jerusalem, Cairo and Alexandria, three cities drifting toward chaos in a war-torn Middle East. At its centre is Manos: a poet, lover of life, man of intellect and integrity, and hero of the Greek war against the Italian invasion, but who now deserts the national army to join the leftists in their clandestine struggle against the Greek fascists and royalists. Underground operations take him from city to city, involving him in a chain of shifting and perilous relationships. Manos is forced to choose between his human impulses and the b...

Alfred is just another ordinary teenager. Or so he thinks until his life turns upside down. His father is found dead, his mother is murdered and his brother is abducted. Alfred is the only one who can save him. But how? What should he do? What can he do, when he discovers that nothing is as he thought? Everything is part of a plan. A plan that has been kept secret through the centuries. A plan that will either save the world or seal its doom. Alfred can't be certain of anything. He only knows one thing. What he has been told: All the answers he is searching for are waiting...

"Imagine what it would feel like if you lived on a planet that only offered partial, or no free will at all. You would be living a predetermined existence in an easy and comfortable life where others made all of your decisions for you, and that was just the way you liked it. But then, all of a sudden, a very powerful bad guy appears on the scene and everything in your, previously routine life, changes?" What makes this book so exciting, are the changes and unpredictable developments in every chapter. In order for Ezerstenia to receive the energy of free will, (a privile...

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 Kem...

They'd said to him "Take care! You've only got two minutes at your disposal to jump out of the train... You won't look behind you, just forwards to the Greek border. Whatever you hear, whatever happens, you'll run towards the Greek border." He did it all for Marie and his children, he said. Whatever he did was like a knife in Marie's heart, while those children hadn't really managed to get to know him, and then only from what was said by their grandfather and the aunts... At least after your death, you will listen to me, father.

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...

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 hi...

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...

Kesariani, once you were a star; for a moment you shone in the firmament and then, you vanished for ever into the void of history... There's nothing left. Now you're plastering the last traces of gunshots on your forehead, like an old dog licking its wounds, where the scar has healed." Marios Hakkas lived almost all his tragically short life close to the Athenian neighbourhood of Kesariani, in the shadow of Mount Hymettos. Throughout the Nazi Occupation of Greece, this district was the symbol of Greek Resistance and Hakkas' stories are indelibly marked by the blood-stain...

This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of the Proust's "Remembrance of things past"? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? -everyday people from Ritsos' neighbourhood members of his fami...

This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself? Is it a roman fleuve in the sense of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past? Is it a wild prose-poetic fling in a "sarcastic climate"? Or is it an autobiography of Greece's most human poet, whom Aragon hailed as the "greatest poet of his time"? And what about the strange title? How are the established Orthodox saints, traditionally decorating the panels near the altar, how are they replaced by anonymous human beings? - everyday people from Ritsos' neighbourhood; members of his large fa...