Books Set In

Best Books Set in Greece — 12 Novels From Athens to the Greek Islands

Greece has been generating fiction for three thousand years and attracting writers from outside who come to stand in its extraordinary light and write their most ambitious books. The twelve novels here range from Donna Tartt's Vermont-to-Vermont orbit around a group of students who have drunk too deeply of classical Greece, to Louis de Bernières's Cephalonia under Italian occupation, to John Fowles's Spetses-island masterpiece of manipulation and identity. The Greek islands in particular have functioned as laboratories for writers seeking escape from the mundane — and the books that result tend to have the intensity of isolation and the weight of a landscape that carries its history in every stone.

From Athens to the islands

Literary, historical & memoir

Spanning WWII to present

Greece in Fiction: What to Expect

The most famous novels set in Greece (The Secret History, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Magus) are actually about outsiders — Americans and English people — experiencing Greece rather than Greek fiction from the inside. Genuine Greek literary fiction in translation is less commonly read in the English world.
Greek islands as settings tend to produce novels about transformation, identity, and the uncanny — the isolation and the mythic weight of the landscape seem to encourage writers toward the strange and the extreme.
Historical Greek fiction is nearly always about World War Two and the German and Italian occupations — some of the most brutal episodes of the European war happened in Greece, and the literary response is proportionally intense.
The Corfu of the Durrell family (Gerald and Lawrence) is one of the great locations in British travel writing and memoir — the island in the 1930s, before mass tourism, functions as a paradise lost in both their accounts.
Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, Report to Greco) is the essential Greek novelist — his work combines the physical exuberance of the Mediterranean with the deepest philosophical anxiety.

Literary — Greece as Crucible

Pick #1

The Secret History

Donna Tartt • 1992 • Literary Fiction / Thriller

Vermont college with classical obsession Bacchanal, murder, and consequence Greece as philosophy, not place

Richard Papen transfers to a small Vermont college and falls in with a group of classics students under the charismatic Professor Julian Morrow. The group's obsession with ancient Greek beauty and ritual leads them, through a genuine bacchanal in the Vermont woods, to a murder — and the novel opens by telling us this, then slowly reveals how it happened. The Secret History is not set in Greece but is saturated with it: the ancient Greek world (Dionysus, beauty, the release of the self into something larger) is the intellectual framework within which everything happens, and Tartt's evocation of the appeal of classical aesthetics — the reason intelligent people choose beauty over morality — is more convincing than any straightforward travelogue of Athens. For this reason it belongs on every Greece reading list: it is about the Greece of the mind, which is where most of us live when we think of Greece.

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Pick #2

Zorba the Greek

Nikos Kazantzakis • 1946 • Literary Fiction

Crete, 1917 Life-force and philosophy The essential Greek novel

A quiet intellectual narrator travels to Crete to manage a lignite mine and falls into an unlikely friendship with Alexis Zorba — a large, exuberant, catastrophically incompetent, and totally alive Macedonian who dances on the beach when things go wrong and eats his way through every disaster. Kazantzakis uses the contrast between the cerebral narrator and the physical Zorba to stage a philosophical argument about how to live — whether thought or appetite, contemplation or action, is the authentic response to existence. The Cretan landscape is rendered with volcanic love; the novel's climax, when the mine's cable system collapses in front of the entire village, is one of the great scenes of ruinous comedy in twentieth-century fiction. Anthony Quinn's performance in the 1964 film gave the world its image of Zorba; the novel is more complex and more serious than the film suggests.

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Pick #3

The Magus

John Fowles • 1965 • Literary Fiction / Psychological Thriller

Spetses island, Greece Games, identity, and manipulation One of the great cult novels

Nicholas Urfe, an English schoolteacher, takes a position on the Greek island of Phraxos (based on Spetses) and falls into the orbit of Maurice Conchis — an enormously wealthy Greek recluse who stages elaborate psychological "godgames" around the villa. What follows is a novel of layered reality and unreliable revelation: is this theatre? psychological experiment? seduction? espionage? something more sinister? Fowles revised the novel in 1977 and still considered it imperfect, but its imperfections are part of its power — it is trying to do something genuinely new with the idea of fiction as manipulation. The Greek island setting (the heat, the isolation, the mythic resonance of the landscape) is essential: this is a novel that could only happen somewhere that carries the weight of the ancient world. A cult novel for good reason, and one of the most formally ambitious British novels of the twentieth century.

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Pick #4

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides • 2002 • Literary Fiction

Smyrna 1922, then Michigan Greek diaspora across a century Pulitzer Prize winner

Cal Stephanides narrates the history of his Greek-American family — from the catastrophe of Smyrna in 1922 (the burning of the Greek and Armenian quarters by Turkish troops, one of the defining tragedies of early twentieth-century history) through three generations in Detroit, to Cal's own discovery, as a teenager, that he is intersex. Eugenides's Pulitzer-winning novel begins in Greece with an act of incest that sends a recessive gene through the family and ends in 1970s America, but Greece — its catastrophes and its culture — haunts every page. The Smyrna sections, depicting the end of the Greek presence in Asia Minor, are historically devastating and novelistically extraordinary. The novel is partly about identity (national, sexual, familial) and partly about the impossibility of escaping where you came from.

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Historical — Greece at War and After

Pick #5

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernières • 1994 • Historical Fiction

Cephalonia, WWII Italian occupation Love story across wartime One of the bestselling British novels of the 1990s

On the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Italian occupation of World War Two, Pelagia, the daughter of the island's doctor, falls in love with Captain Antonio Corelli of the Italian forces — a mandolin-playing, life-loving officer who represents everything the war is trying to destroy. De Bernières's novel is many things simultaneously: a love story, a historical account of the Italian massacre on Cephalonia (real, devastating, and little known), a portrait of an island community under occupation, and a novel about the stories we tell about war after the fact. The Cephalonia it describes — the food, the landscape, the social world, the specific texture of Greek island life before mass tourism — is rendered with the loving detail of someone who has looked very closely. Controversially adapted into a Nicholas Cage film that strips most of the novel's moral complexity.

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Pick #6

The Island

Victoria Hislop • 2005 • Historical Fiction

Spinalonga island, Crete, 1930s–1950s Leprosy colony and family secrets Hugely popular Greek historical fiction

Alexis Fielding travels to Crete to learn the story of her mother's family and discovers that her great-grandmother was sent to Spinalonga — the island leper colony off the coast of Elounda — in the 1930s. Hislop's novel alternates between Alexis's present-day journey and the historical reconstruction of life on Spinalonga, where a community of people exiled for their illness built a functioning society under extraordinary constraints. The Cretan landscape — the heat, the sea, the specific beauty of the north coast — is rendered with deep affection, and the historical detail of the leper colony is meticulously researched. The novel was a massive bestseller in Britain and Greece and prompted a significant increase in tourism to Spinalonga. For readers who want Greek historical fiction that is emotionally involving and accessibly written.

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Pick #7

Eleni

Nicholas Gage • 1983 • Narrative Nonfiction / Memoir

Northern Greece, Greek Civil War 1948 A journalist investigates his mother's execution True story of war and sacrifice

Nicholas Gage, a New York Times journalist, returns to the Greek village of Lia — where his mother Eleni was executed by Communist forces during the Greek Civil War in 1948 — to reconstruct her life and death. Eleni Gatzoyiannis, a village woman who had never left her valley, smuggled her children to safety and was tortured and shot for it. Gage's account, built from documents, survivor testimony, and his own investigation, is one of the great works of narrative nonfiction about the Greek Civil War — a conflict largely unknown in the West but devastating in its effects on the country. The northern Greek landscape, so different from the tourist-poster islands, is rendered with the precision of a journalist and the pain of a son. One of the books most likely to make you rethink what you know about modern Greece.

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Pick #8

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller • 2011 • Historical Fiction / Mythology

Ancient Greece and Troy Achilles and Patroclus retold Orange Prize winner

Patroclus, a young prince exiled from his own kingdom, becomes the companion of Achilles — the most beautiful, most gifted, and most doomed warrior in Greece — and the novel follows their bond from boyhood through the siege of Troy. Miller studied classics at Brown and Harvard and brings genuine scholarly knowledge to a novel that is also a deeply felt love story: the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, ambiguous in Homer, is here made fully explicit, and the Trojan War unfolds around it with the weight of prophecy fulfilled. The ancient Greek world — its gods, its social codes, its specific understanding of heroism and its costs — is rendered from the inside, not as spectacle but as lived reality. Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction. For readers who want ancient Greece through the most emotionally direct route available in contemporary fiction.

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Memoir & Travel — Greece Encountered

Pick #9

My Family and Other Animals

Gerald Durrell • 1956 • Memoir / Comedy

Corfu, 1935–1939 A child naturalist in paradise One of the funniest British memoirs

Ten-year-old Gerald Durrell moves with his eccentric family (mother, three siblings including the writer Lawrence Durrell) to Corfu in 1935 and proceeds to collect every insect, reptile, bird, and animal on the island while the family disintegrates into cheerful chaos around him. Durrell's memoir is one of the funniest books in the British tradition — the family's servants, neighbours, and houseguests are rendered with the affectionate exaggeration of a born storyteller — and also a genuinely beautiful evocation of Corfu before mass tourism: the olive groves, the sea's clarity, the village social life, the extraordinary biodiversity. The Corfu of this book is a paradise, and reading it produces an almost physical desire to go there. Part of the Corfu trilogy; the other two volumes (Birds, Beasts and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods) are nearly as good.

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Pick #10

The Colossus of Maroussi

Henry Miller • 1941 • Travel Memoir

Athens, Corfu, Crete, Mycenae, 1939 Miller's most lyrical book Greece as spiritual awakening

Henry Miller — known for the transgressive sexuality of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn — spent the summer of 1939 in Greece at the invitation of Lawrence Durrell and wrote the most lyrical and least scandalous book of his career. The Colossus of Maroussi is about what Greece does to the visitor: the specific quality of Greek light at Mycenae and Epidaurus, the way the ancient world presses through the modern landscape, the liberation that the country seemed to offer a certain kind of American intellectual in the 1930s. Miller considered it his best book. Whether or not you agree, it captures the Greece-as-revelation experience with a directness and an ecstasy that makes it essential reading before or after any visit to the ancient sites.

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Pick #11

Prospero's Cell

Lawrence Durrell • 1945 • Travel Memoir

Corfu, 1937–1941 Lawrence Durrell's Corfu journal Poetic and intense

While his younger brother Gerald was collecting animals, Lawrence Durrell was writing his journal of Corfu life — the same island, the same years (1937 to 1941, when the German invasion ended the idyll), but rendered through the sensibility of a novelist and poet rather than a naturalist-comedian. Durrell's prose is more demanding and more beautiful than Gerald's; the Corfu he describes is stranger and more mythic, infused with the shadow of the ancient world and the specific quality of island light. Together, the two brothers give you Corfu from two complementary angles. Prospero's Cell is the first volume of Durrell's island trilogy; Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus) complete it. For readers who want their Greece literary and intense.

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Pick #12

Dinner with Persephone

Patricia Storace • 1996 • Travel Memoir

Athens and Greece, 1990s American poet's year in Greece Sharp, literary, feminist

American poet Patricia Storace spends a year in Athens and Greece in the early 1990s and writes one of the most intelligent and subversive travel books about the country — probing the myths that Greece tells about itself (as the birthplace of Western civilisation, as the owner of ancient glory) and the myths that outsiders project onto it (as a timeless Mediterranean idyll). Storace reads Greek literature in the original and talks to everyone — priests, politicians, feminists, taxi drivers, villagers — and what she finds is a country wrestling with its own self-image in ways that outsider accounts systematically miss. The book is demanding and rewarding in equal measure: it insists on seeing Greece as a real, contemporary place rather than a mythological stage set. The best intellectual travel book about Greece in English.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What's the best book to read before visiting Greece?

For the Greek islands generally: My Family and Other Animals (Durrell) gives you the pleasure of the island life before you arrive and sets an impossibly beautiful standard. For Crete specifically: Zorba the Greek and Captain Corelli's Mandolin between them cover the island's modern literary history. For Athens and the ancient sites: The Colossus of Maroussi (Miller) captures better than any guidebook what it feels like to stand at Mycenae or Epidaurus. For Greek history and context: Tom Holland's Persian Fire or Paul Cartledge's The Spartans give you the ancient background that makes the landscape legible.

Are there good Greek novels by Greek authors in English translation?

Yes, though they are less commonly read. Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, Report to Greco) is the essential Greek novelist and is widely available. Kostas Taktsis's The Third Wedding Wreath is a vivid social portrait of Athens in the 1950s and 1960s. Stratis Haviaras's When the Tree Sings is the finest Greek novel about the World War Two occupation and the civil war that followed. Petros Markaris writes Athens crime fiction featuring the detective Costas Haritos; the series begins with Late-Night News. Rhea Galanaki's The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha is a historical novel about a Cretan converted to Islam under Ottoman rule.

What is the Greek Civil War and why does it appear in so much Greek fiction?

The Greek Civil War (1946–1949) was fought between the Greek government (backed by Britain and then the United States) and the Democratic Army of Greece (backed by Yugoslavia and other Communist states). It followed directly from the German and Italian occupation of World War Two and was extraordinarily brutal — villages were divided, families split, and atrocities committed by both sides. The Communist defeat led to decades of political suppression and the emigration of tens of thousands of Greeks. The civil war remains a living wound in Greek national memory in a way that the World War Two occupation does not — partly because there is still no consensus on how to remember it. Fiction has been one of the primary ways Greeks have processed what happened.

Is The Magus worth reading despite its reputation for being confusing?

Yes, with appropriate expectations. The Magus is deliberately confusing: the godgames that Conchis plays on Nicholas are designed to disorient, and Fowles refuses to resolve the ambiguity at the novel's end (the 1977 revised ending remains controversial). The confusion is the point — the novel is about the impossibility of knowing whether what we experience is real, theatrical, or somewhere in between, which is both a formally interesting problem and a genuinely frustrating reading experience. Readers who want resolution and clarity will be disappointed. Readers willing to sit inside sustained uncertainty and trust that the questions the novel raises are worth the discomfort will find it one of the most formally ambitious British novels of its century. Read it slowly, and accept that Fowles is not going to help you.