100 Books Like The Colossus of Maroussi

I love this book because it tells the well-known stories of the early Greek gods and investigates many of their mythology's lesser-known aspects.

Furthermore, the book is written in a witty and entertaining style whilst simultaneously remaining erudite and deep–a difficult balance to achieve. This is a perfect complement to Fry’s equally brilliant The Ode Less Travelled, and it left me wanting to know more.

My current can’t-put-this-down read, The Island of Missing Trees is set between present-day London and Cyprus in the 1970s during the break-out of the civil war on the island.

It’s a family drama told in third person but interspersed between chapters following the lives of Ada and her star-crossed parents, a Greek man and a Turkish woman, there are whole sections of this book told from the perspective of a fig tree.

I particularly enjoy all of these sections because I never thought I might find myself one day sympathising/empathising with a tree and yet somehow, Shafak is really able to make me feel for that lonely fig tree whose comments on the world and human nature are so profound and thought provoking, they’ve invaded even my dreams. 

This book is a gem for lovers of Greece and of superlative English prose.

For me the book is far and away the best evocation of a wild and remote part of Greece that I got to know and treasure when tramping through its olive fields in search of ancient inscriptions. Leigh Fermor was incapable of writing a dull sentence.

His imagination allied with what he observed himself in his wanderings combine to bring out all the strangeness of Mani’s history of brigands and vendettas, of villages bristling with defensive towers and of fishermen descended—perhaps—from Byzantine emperors.   

I came across this book while researching my guide to Northern Greece. Kapka Kassabova is a Bulgarian writer now living in the Scottish Highlands, who returned to the land she knew as a child: the once heavily militarized border between Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Her account of the places and people she meets in this forgotten corner of the world are uncanny, full of wonder, tragedy and horror, comedy and beauty, in a place where even in the 21st-century magic and the supernatural still live on.  

As a woman, I’ll never be able to visit the fantastical Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos, although I’ve looked at from land and sea often enough! But after reading this evocative account from the 1920s by a very young Robert Byron (best known for his classic, The Road to Oxiana) I feel as if I had been there, in a completely other (and rather eccentric) world long before the monasteries’ current revival and modernization—they say the monks even have mobile phones these days! Byron’s black-and-white photographs and drawings add to the charm. 

In 1947, archaeologist Kevin Andrews went to the Peloponnese on a Fulbright fellowship to study the Crusader castles and found a country in the midst of a civil war. He was one of the few foreigners there at the time, which his book vividly brings to life.. after a first rather idyllic description of stomping on grapes with friends on Paros he enters another world. Yet he was so moved by the humanity of the villagers in a period of great poverty, suspicion, and turmoil that he made Greece his home, and wrote numerous other books about Greece, but this is his best… about a period I hope is never repeated.  

This is a book that still makes me sob, even on the third, fourth, and fifth read.

Louis de Bernieres’ love story set during the second world war on the island of Kefalonia is more than just another beach read. It chronicles the tragedy of the events of the second world war, holding a microscope over the island of Kefalonia and homing in on an imagined love story between Pelagia, a local girl, and Captain Corelli, an Italian soldier stationed on the island as part of the Italian occupation of Greece.

Yes, this is a piece of fiction but I love that also it manages to paint a picture of life under occupation in Greece during the 1940s. De Bernieres captures the light, the scent, the very essence of this Greek island, and the fire of an incredible love affair in his beautiful prose, while also commenting on the atrocities… show more.

This book is pure poetry to me. It follows the lives of three sisters on the precipice of adulthood during 1930s Greece.

I love that when it was published in the 1940s here in Greece, it was seen as a scandalous piece of literature. I can see why - Liberaki writes fervently and openly about the trials and tribulations of female teenhood, detailing gossip, romance, and even the loss of virginity with such poise and vim that it is still relevant and relatable to women today.

It was the kind of book that my own Greek Yiayia (grandmother) was absolutely not allowed to get her hands on. This book, for me, has it all. It’s bucolic, romantic, and oozes beautiful imagery of the hot, dry summers in Athens and the surrounding countryside. A perfect character study.

This is a fat book, but almost unputdownable. What could be more fundamental to understanding the world of the ancient Greeks than finding out how many of them there were, and how they worked the land? We are learning more and more about the uses of the countryside, especially from survey archaeology, in which walkers systematically transect a given area of land. A good eighty or ninety percent of all ancient Greeks made a living (not necessarily a good one) through agriculture. The issues involved in trying to determine, say, the overall population of Greece in 500 BCE, or the pattern of land use in Athens, or the annual rates of cereal productivity, are complex, but Sallares steers us through the evidence with a sure hand.

It’s impossible to enter the mindset of the ancient Greeks without understanding that democracy runs deeply in their cultural bloodstream. There are numerous books on the subject – I did a course called Athenian Democracy: An Experiment for the Ages for The Great Courses – but Cartledge’s book, as the title suggests, offers a biography from its beginnings down to the present day. It also provides a nuanced exploration of the connection between Greek politics and society. Democracy: A Life depicts democracy not as a theoretical model but at work, and, in the challenges it faces today, a work in progress. Get A Life!