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Recommended fiction books about Greece
Here you can buy all the books from one of the most prolific Greek authors, Nikos Kazanzakis.
Not only the famous Zorba the Greek, but 14 other titles including:
The Last Temptation of Christ, Freedom or Death, Report to Greco, & many others.
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Although Aesop’s Fables are supposedly for children, they actually have many lessons for all of us to learn.
Captivating the hearts and minds of kids and adults for generations, Aesop, a former Greek slave, developed simple and meaningful adventures featuring animals or insects to teach a moral standard or lesson for living. The most well known and well loved of Aesop’s fables are included here:
- The Hare and the Tortoise
- The Lion and the Mouse
- The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
- The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
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Homer’s two famous books, The Iliad & The Odyssey tell timeless stories of men & the Gods, their struggles, failures & successes.
These stories will never age!
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The hero Aeneas was already known to Graeco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad. Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas’ wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome, and fashioned the Aeneid into a compelling founding myth or national epic that tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic Wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues, and legitimised the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes, and gods of Rome and Troy.
The Aeneid is widely regarded as Virgil’s masterpiece and one of the greatest works of Latin literature.
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C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933) lived in relative obscurity in Alexandria, and a collected edition of his poems was not published until after his death. Now, however, he is regarded as the most important figure in twentieth-century Greek poetry, and his poems are considered among the most powerful in modern European literature.
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Victoria Hislop is the international bestselling author of The Island and The Return. The Island sold over a million copies in the UK and has been translated into 24 languages. Victoria’s second novel, The Return, has been published in more than a dozen languages.
You can find all her books here.
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STEP INTO ANOTHER WORLD – OF MAGIC, MAYHEM, MONSTERS AND MANIACAL GODS – IN STEPHEN FRY’S MOMENTOUS SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, MYTHOS
Mythos is the first of a series of 4 books about Ancient Greece – all 4 worth reading.
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The rembetika, songs that were sung in the poor quarters of Smyrna, Istanbul and the ports of Greece in the late nineteenth century, and became the popular bouzouki music of the 1930s to 1950s, have many parallels with American blues. Like the blues, the rembetika were the music of outsiders, who developed their own slang and their own forms of expression. Road to Rembetika was the first book in English to attempt a general survey of the world of the ‘rembetes’ who smoked hashish and danced the passionate introspective zebekiko to release their emotions.
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For a huge selection of books about Greece, click on the links to the right.
If you cannot find a specific book you are looking for, use Amazon’s Search bar.
Or use the search bar to find books about your favourite island, author, or anything else.
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Some in German, some in English.
Natalie Haynes has written many books (at least eight) about ancient Greece and the Greek Myths, and has a very different take on these stories.
All her books are well worth a read.
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Matt Barrett has been writing about Greece since the advent of the Internet. His website has grown and grown and has information about all aspects of traveling in Greece.
He has also written a hilarious book about some aspects of his life:
Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian. The whole family have to get to grips with their new life and identities: the children start school and tackle a new language, and Sofka’s husband, Vassilis, comes home after half a lifetime away. Meanwhile, Sofka resolves to get to know her new city and become a Greek citizen, which turns out to be a process of Byzantine complexity.
She has written many other books – all excellent!
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Some in German, some in English.
From Radio 4 presenter, bestselling author and national treasure John Humphrys, a funny and engaging memoir of building a home in Greece written together with his son Christopher.
It was a moment of mad impulse when John Humphrys decided to buy a semi-derelict cottage and a building site on a plot of land overlooking the Aegean. A few minutes gazing out over the most glorious bay he had ever seen was all it took to persuade him. After all, his son Christopher was already raising his family there so he would help build the beautiful villa that would soon rise there. What could possibly go wrong?
Everthing!
A profoundly instructive course in the idiosyncrasies of Greek law, custom and culture … entertainingly chronicled.
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Rachel is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore her sister’s derision, society’s silent wagging finger and her father’s advancing years. She’s travelled the world, but now finds herself at a crossroads at an age where most people would stop globetrotting and settle. She’s never been one to conform to the nine-to-five lifestyle, so why should she start now? Was it wrong to love the freedom and independence a single life provided, to put off the search for Mr Right and the children? Perhaps she could find the time for one last adventure…So with sunshine in mind, Rachel takes a TEFL course and heads to Greece after securing a job teaching English in a remote village. She wasn’t looking for love, but she found it in the lifestyle and history of the country, its culture and the enduring volatility of its people. Girl Gone Greek is a contemporary women’s fiction novel. When Rachel moved to Greece to escape a life of social conformity, she found a country of unconventional characters and economic turmoil. The last thing she expected was to fall in love with the chaos that reigned about her.
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The next two recommendations are books about the Bohemian lifestyle of Hydra in the 1960’s.
In 1951 the Australian writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston left grey, post-war London for Greece. Settling first on the tiny island of Kalymnos, then Hydra, their plan was to live simply and focus on their writing, away from the noise of the big city. The result is two of Charmian Clift’s best known and most loved books, the memoirs Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus. Peel Me a Lotus, the companion volume to Mermaid Singing relays their move to Hydra where they bought a house and grappled with the chaos of domestic life and three children whilst also becoming the centre of an informal community of artists and writers. The group later included Leonard Cohen who became their lodger and his girlfriend Marianne Ihlen. Clift paints an evocative picture of the characters and sun-drenched rhythms of traditional life, long before backpackers and mass tourism descended.
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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.
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When Ava Martin’s new husband unexpectedly ditches her months after they’ve relocated across the world to Greece, the heartbroken American expat isn’t sure where home is anymore. On the verge of flying back to the States with her tail between her legs, she makes an abrupt decision to follow her gut instead and stay on in Greece. She soon discovers that the tumultuous, culture-rich Mediterranean country is coloring her life in a way no place else can, changing her forever. But is it where she belongs? Ava’s newfound independence throws her into the thick of Athenian reality, where she has brushes with violent police riots and gets a taste of both the alluring islands and the city nightlife. Despite pressure from her mother, uncertainty over her impending divorce, and unresolved issues with her long-estranged father weighing on her, she’s determined to make it on her own. With the help of two very colorful Greek friends, she laughs and learns while facing culture shock, language barriers and the charm of Mediterranean men, until a life-threatening medical emergency back home in sleepy Ithaca, N.Y., forces her to decide where she truly belongs – and what truly matters.
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When hotshot detective Andreas Kaldis is promoted out of Athens to serve as police chief for Mykonos island, he’s certain his homicide investigation days are over. Murders don’t happen in Greece’s tourist heaven. At least, that’s what he’s thinking as he stares at the remains of a young woman ritually bound and buried on a pile of human bones inside a remote mountain church. Then he starts finding bodies, bones, and suspects everywhere he looks. It’s Greece’s most unimaginable nightmare, one no politician wants to confront—a serial killer loose in paradise.
One of a series of 14 books featuring detective Andreas Kaldis.
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The author of the bestselling Leonardo’s Swans traverses the centuries into the hearts of two extraordinary women to reveal the passions, ambitions, and controversies surrounding the Elgin Marbles.
The Elgin Marbles have been displayed in the British Museum for nearly two hundred years, and for just as long they have been the center of a raging controversy. In Stealing Athena, Karen Essex chronicles the Marbles’ amazing journey through the dynamic narratives of Mary Nisbet, wife of the Earl of Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople, and Aspasia, the mistress of Perikles, the most powerful man in Athens during that city’s Golden Age.
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