The Return: The 'captivating and deeply moving' Number One bestseller

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Este terceiro livro que li de Victoria Hislop, a seguir aos livros da mesma autora,"A Ilha" e "O Regresso", fez-me "mergulhar" na história de Tessalonica e também da Grécia no decurso do século XX, entre 1917 (ano em que um incêndio destrói grande parte daquela cidade) e o terramoto do dia 20 de junho de 1978, que também afetou a mesma cidade, com as suas consequências devastadoras.

The Thread by Victoria Hislop | Goodreads The Thread by Victoria Hislop | Goodreads

Victoria married Private Eye editor Ian Hislop on 16 April 1988 in Oxford; the couple have two children, Emily Helen (born 1990) and William David (born 1993). [8] Hislop's heroes are trying to survive - not always with success - through all these difficult times. Their lives get tangled up with each other's history and the author does a really good job in unfolding her characters during such an era. There was simply too much stuff happening and too many characters to make anything in particularly meaningful in my view. I wanted Hislop to stop, take a breath and really explore what was going on in a scene or era - it seemed rushed and not nearly enough attention was given to the narrative, which seemed confused in places. For someone coming from Thessaloniki and having an interest in its history, i think that this a perfect book!! Victoria Hislop did a great research and she said things as they were, from the point of views of her characters. A autora segue a mesma estrutura a que já nos habituou. O livro começa no presente e regressamos ao passado para contextualizarmos o que acontece no início do livro.

Praise for The Figurine

On the verge of making an important decision, Alexis Fielding yearns to learn about her mother’s past. Born in Bromley, Kent, she was raised in Tonbridge and attended Tonbridge Grammar School. [3] She studied English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, [4] and worked in publishing and as a journalist before becoming an author. [5] Career [ edit ] Bearing no regrets whatsoever for fighting for the communists, the remainder of her life is troubled by some of her decisions. Why is the book not "literary?" Well, there's way too much of "tell" rather than "show". Some paragraphs use the same adjective twice. However, this is all forgivable because the author attempted to describe such a grand swath of history, and did such remarkable research.

The Island – Victoria Hislop The Island – Victoria Hislop

Dimitri Komninos is born in Thessaloniki in 1917, the year that an inferno ravaged the multicultural city.The idea came out of a conversation with some school teachers in Crete.” said Victoria “They commented that there were so many themes in the story that were as relevant to children as to adults but felt that the original novel was a little too grown-up for many of them. I realised that much of the book is actually about children and their experiences of stigma and loss, so this has been a wonderful experience for me, to look at things through their eyes. Writing for children requires a whole different set of skills and I hope they will enjoy reading it.” I hadn't realized that there was such an enormous flow of Greeks and Turks after WWI, forcibly ejected from places they had spent previous centuries living in peace. The author did a great job portraying the harmony of mixed-ethnicity (Greek, Jewish, Muslim) neighborhoods in Greece before the war. I learned a lot about the turmoil Greece faced both during WWII and afterwards, with collaborationists helping the Nazis, and Communists fighting for control. Visiting Greece in the '80s and afterwards, one would have no idea that the country had survived so much recent violence and turbulence. This book has expectations to be epic but the sad reality is that it looks like a book written by a tourist who wanted to stage some kind of story in a place she fancied. Those who had fought against Franco experienced years of repression and even when the fascist dictator died in 1975, many people in Spain still remained silent about their experiences. The friend with whom Hislop stayed in Granada while researching her novel refused point blank to discuss the past with her. It troubles her that she has been unable to find out why the shutters came down when she mentioned that she would be writing a novel about the civil war. One enterprising couple is on the verge of launching the most striking hotel in a region where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live in peace.

Victoria Hislop - Fantastic Fiction Victoria Hislop - Fantastic Fiction

These are memories she treasures because she’s always had a wonderful relationship with her mother, who is now in her eighties and lives close by in Tunbridge Wells. The story follows Katerina from being a Greek refugee child fleeing Turkey, to old age in northern Greece. Her life is intertwined with the widow who "adopts" and raises her, the wealthy Greek woman who lives temporarily in the humble Greek neighborhood in Thessalonika, and Moreno Jewish neighbors. The book includes some wonderful plotting at the end, where loose ends miraculously get tied up and a prologue/epilogue set up provides a cool set of bookends to the plot. There's even a (pretty predictable) romance to spice things up a bit. There was, in effect, a “pacto de olvido”, a pact of forgetting,” says Hislop, when we meet over morning coffee in the cafe of a Tunbridge Wells department store – the Hislops and their children live in the nearby village of Sissinghurst. She’s on her way to a book signing, otherwise we would have met at the family home. A wattle-and-daub house, it is 500-years-old and apparently, it’s a miracle it’s still standing. This is how I like my history; a social interpretation of how political, religious and environmental forces affect people in their day to day lives. In 1917 we learn that Thessaloniki is devastated by a fire which has a huge impact on the future of this multi-cultural city, where Christians, Muslims and Jews were living together in a fairly successful symbiotic way. Add two world wars, civil war, communism versus nationalism and it's clear that the city is never going to be the same again for its inhabitants. Richard also finds out about the acequias, the unique and ancient Moorish watering systems still used on a community basis by the local farmers and growers. They channel and distribute melt and spring water from the Sierra Nevada mountains, lending the Alpujarras its verdant character and underpinning the rich ecosystem in the valleys.However, that is only the begining of a series of disasters that will forever alter the future of the city. Their father’s televisual fame used to embarrass the siblings dreadfully when they were younger, she says. “It’s a bit of a drag having a parent on the telly, I think. But Ian’s famous because people like watching him and Paul Merton – who’s become a real family friend – so we can’t really complain.” A dramatic and moving adaptation of Victoria’s bestselling novel "The Island" with rich, full-colour illustrations by Gill Smith that will transport the reader to the timeless and beautiful Greek landscape … Authored by Victoria Hislop and Duncan Goodhew, this guide is meant for the overweight and out of shape men who desperately want to change their lives.