Tag Archives: Corfu

A Novel Set on a Greek Island

An island view
An island view

Questions, Question, Questions…

Readers contacted A Traveler’s Library to find books for particular places.

One of the commenters on A Traveler’s Library mentioned that she was looking for a book for her trip to Quebec City.

Another wanted a book for a journey to Costa Rica.

Somebody did a search for this blog by using the words “novel set on a Greek Island.”

I can handle that last one. Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres, 1994. This is a fascinating, moving, funny and sad novel that I happily inhaled during a long flight to Greece. I loved the book so much, that I did not want to see the movie.

Other Greek Island books that I loved are non-fiction. Lawrence Durrell wrote Bitter Lemons,1958, which relates the bitter post-World War II history of Cyprus as Greek Cypriots fought to unite with Greece.

Durrell’s Reflections on a Marine Venus1953,takes place in a peaceful atmosphere of his two-year stay on Rhodes. The opening is worth quoting: “Somewhere among the note-books of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of the spirit.  There are people, Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible.”

In Prospero’s Cell, 1955, he portrays life on Corfu.

An island village
An island village

And if Durrell does not make islands irresistible in these books, then move on to the magnificently illustrated The Greek Islands, 1978, with his words beside the pictures. If you can find this book, it will have you packing your bags even before you’ve found the cheap flight to Athens.

If you get the idea I am a fan of Lawrence Durrell, you are right.  I have all of these books in my library, and never tire of his way with words.