Books from Greece
48 popular greek books
Travel the world without leaving your chair.
The target of the Read Around The World Challenge is to read at least one book written by an author from each and every country in the world.
All books that are listed here as part of the "Read Around Europe Challenge" were written by authors from Greece.
Find a great book for the next part of your reading journey around the world from this book list. The following popular books have been recommended so far.
21.
Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus EN
Description:
Prometheus Bound is the starkest and strangest of the classic Greek tragedies, a play in which god and man are presented as radically, irreconcilably at odds. It begins with the shock of hammer blows as the Titan Prometheus is shackled to a rock in the Caucasus. This is his punishment for giving the gift of fire to humankind and for thwarting Zeus’s decision to exterminate the human race. Prometheus’s pain is unceasing, but he refuses to recant his commitment to humanity, to whom he has also brought the knowledge of writing, mathematics, medicine, and architecture. He hints that he knows how Z... continue
22.
Study Guide to Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis by Intelligent Education EN
Description:
A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek, the internationally acclaimed novel of opposing forces. As a tale of Greek's Great Famine during WWII, Zorba the Greek gives a fresh perspective on the duality between body and mind, beauty and pain, feeling and thinking. Moreover, Kazantzakis empowers readers to pursue life like Zorba. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Kazantzakis' classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bri... continue
23.
Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho : Poems and Fragments of Sappho by Sappho EN
Description:
More or less 150 years after Homer's Iliad, Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, west off the coast of what is present Turkey. Little remains today of her writings, which are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria some 500 years after her death. The surviving texts consist of a lamentably small and fragmented body of lyric poetry - among them poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation and remembrance - that nevertheless enables us to hear the living voice of the poet Plato called the tenth Muse. This is a new translation of her surviving po... continue
24.
The Complete Poems of Sappho by Sappho, Willis Barnstone (translator) EN
Description:
A prize-winning poet offers a contemporary translation of poems written by the greatest Greek love poet, whose thrilling lyric verse and mystique endures to be rediscovered by each generation. Original.
25.
Description:
High on Olympus, Zeus and the assembled deities look down on the world of men, to the city of Troy where a bitter and bloody war has dragged into its tenth year, and a quarrel rages between a legendary warrior and his commander. Greek ships decay, men languish, exhausted, and behind the walls of Troy a desperate people await the next turn of fate. This is the Iliad: an ancient story of enduring power; magnetic characters defined by stirring and momentous speeches; a panorama of human lives locked in a heroic struggle beneath a mischievous or indifferent heaven. Above all, this is a tale of the... continue
26.
The Library of Greek Mythology by Apollodorus EN
Description:
Robin Hard is Tutor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Reading.
27.
The Lonesome Tree by Maria Papayanni EN
Description:
There is a village on the cliffs overlooking the sea, carved in stone under the shadow of a mountain. In the old times it was inhabited by people who explained the unexplained and foresaw the future. But their children and their children’s children forgot how to do that, and now they live in isolation, immutable, and they like it this way. One day Violeta, a middle-aged woman, returns to the village after many years of absence. She lives in a ruined house on the outskirts of the village, and is avoided by all who know about her ill fate. Then something strange occurs: all the votive silver mod... continue
28.
The mauve umbrella by Alki Zei EN
Description:
The Mauve Umbrella is a story of two worlds – the adult world of approaching war and the children’s world of close friendships, rivalry and games of the imagination. Eleftheria lives somewhere in Marousi, Athens, with her parents and younger, identical twin, brothers. It is shortly before the war in 1940 and she is nine, going on ten. The children’s best friend is the daughter of a rich family in the neighbourhood. Later, a young French boy arrives, escaping from Nazi occupied France, to live with his French uncle, who lives in the apartment above Eleftheria’s family.
... continue
29.
The Messenger of Athens by Anne Zouroudi EN
Description:
When the battered body of a young woman is discovered on a remote Greek island, the local police are quick to dismiss her death as an accident. Then a stranger arrives, uninvited, from Athens, announcing his intention to investigate further. His methods are unorthodox, and he brings his own mystery into the web of dark secrets and lies. Who has sent him, on whose authority is he acting, and how does he know of dramas played out decades ago?
30.
The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis EN
Description:
The Murderess is a bone-chilling tale of crime and punishment with the dark beauty of a backwoods ballad. Set on the dirt-poor Aegean island of Skiathos, it is the story of Hadoula, an old woman living on the margins of society and at the outer limits of respectability. Hadoula knows about herbs and their hidden properties, and women come to her when they need help. She knows women’s secrets and she knows the misery of their lives, and as the book begins, she is trying to stop her new-born granddaughter from crying so that her daughter can at last get a little sleep. She rocks the baby and roc... continue