It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something alchemical? A charmed amulet.
When I wrote my debut novel, The Nude, set on a fictionalized island off the southern coast of Greece, I didn’t seek to write about a wide-eyed American wandering abroad and finding her true self amongst the sparkling, specular water of a Grecian seascape. In other words, an escapist book for the sake of escapism. As The Nude circles around questions of cultural theft—namely the buying and selling of illicit antiquities—I hesitated at the idea of empty transportation, at extracting the superficial beauty from a place, without adding value back to it, or at the very least without showing all its sides, its complications, and curiosities. But like my novel’s narrator, I often got stuck in the myopia of my outsiderness. Travel is an elixir, the full Hazzard quote goes, a talisman: a spell cast by what has long and greatly been, over what briefly and simply is. That gap Hazzard describes, the difference between what has been and what is, speaks to a visitor’s greatest privilege and blind spot: the ability to enjoy the present of a place, without taking home any of its past hauntings, or current pains.
I fear that destinations have become commodities. Things to document, to notice momentarily, and then dispose of, forget about. Onto the next. And yet—The Nude’s narrator, Elizabeth—an art historian sent to Greece to acquire a rare statue—has built a life, and career, on the act of noticing. To understand her interiority, I needed the reader to experience how she viewed Greece’s exteriority: the lights and sounds, the architecture, the food. Everything you might find on a postcard, in the kind of book I mentioned earlier. The terrain of escape. Though, as the novel unfurls, I hope Elizabeth’s point of view upends some of those expectations, flips the present onto the past, and vice versa. The idea of ethical travel is a much bigger conversation than the words I’m allotted here, but I will say that when it comes to armchair globetrotting, it comforts me to know that the following books exist, and that through them, we can experience the splendor of Greece but also its depth. So, here are seven thrilling novels set on Greek Islands that offer something more enduring than momentary reverie. Written by both Greek authors and non-Greek authors, both contemporary and not, each of these books casts a spell, and an aftershock, too, a lingering thoughtfulness, and a directive for not only departure, but attunement.
The Magus by John Fowles
The Magus follows a young, flailing poet named Nicholas Urfe, and his budding friendship with the depraved and wealthy English-born ascetic, Maurice Conchis. There’s much to exhume in this nearly 700-page tome: mythological parodies, palatial estates, and psychological mind games, all abutted against the backdrop of an enigmatic, fictional island named Phraxos. As Nicholas falls deeper into Maurice’s deception and disillusionment, the plot lopes toward the absurd. But at its core, The Magus is a book about performance and artifice, and the lengths we go to destroy, and then, remake ourselves again.
The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, translated by Peter Levis
Set on the Aegean Island of Skiatho, a woman named Hadoula understands the misery of being born a woman—and is set to, in simple terms, course correct for the future. A slim, and a biting novella that’s at once folkloric and phantasmagoric, Alexandros Papadiamantis’s descriptions—and Peter Levis’s translation—enervate Hadoula’s crumbling morality, and the island’s beguiling terrain to unnerving effect. Though written over a hundred years ago, The Murderesses’ exigent, exacting vision cuts deep as ever.
Good Will Come from the Sea by Christos Ikonomou, translated by Karen Emmerich
Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea, translated by Karen Emmerich, is technically a short story collection. The four connected tales shadow a group of friends who relocate to an Aegean Island after Greece’s 2009 economic crisis. Ikonomou captures the milieu of Greece’s working class without renouncing the knotty truths of financial desperation—its bleakness and humor. Violence abounds, bestudding these stories with burnt-down tavernas, disfigurement, and disappearing sons. Though brutal, the collection is also soft-hearted. Every tragedy feels earned, and nuanced, and Ikonomou never turns his eye away from his characters’ pain, nor their true desires.
Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne
Set on Hydra, Beautiful Animals circles around the story of two friends, Naomi, the daughter of a British art dealer whose family owns a villa on the island, and Samantha, her American guest. When the pair come across Faoud, a wounded Syrian refugee, lying despondent on the beach, Naomi aims to make him their new summer project. But Faoud resists Naomi and Sam’s naive abstraction of his story and life and forms a space in the narrative all his own, rendering this novel a psychologically astute, searing portrait of class division, modern tourism, the immigration crisis, and the often empty and self-serving humanitarianism of the wealthy.
The Sleepwalker by Margarita Karapanou, translated by Karen Emmerich
Winner of France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, The Sleepwalker introduces us to a new Messiah named Manolis, sent down from an embittered God who aims to wake the island’s sleepwalking inhabitants—a mixture of expats and artists too consumed by their own quest for beauty. As we get to know these characters and their follies and begin to trail Manolis around the island—described, at one point, as a “prison smothered in flowers”—the veritable nightmare—enchanting and comedic and full of compassion—begins.
A Separation by Katie Kitamura
A Separation follows an unnamed, cool-eyed translator navigating a recent split from her husband, Christopher. When her mother-in-law, unaware of the titular separation, pleads that the narrator go find Christopher, who has gone missing during a research trip, the narrator travels to a seaside village in the Mani peninsula. (OK, not an island, but close enough.) As the narrator searches for Christopher, she reflects on the dissolution of their marriage, on loss and absence, and the performance required to sustain a long-term partnership. Artfully tense and sharply observed, A Separation is a meditation on the parameters of intimacy, and, ultimately, love.
Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson
A novel of lust, desire, and memory, Antiquity turns its focus on a thirty-something year old narrator who inserts herself into the mother-daughter dynamic of Helena, an artist, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Olga. The latter of which she develops a romantic and sexual relationship with over the course of a summer spent on Ermoupoli. The island of Syros comes alive in these pages, serving as a mirror and portal through which the narrator attempts to understand her own need for both belonging and destruction. And though the book—and the protagonist herself—remains aware of the unreliable, predatory storytellers that have preceded them, the delusion of Johansson’s narrator lends the novel a queasy slipperiness all its own.
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