Mapped
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
On the Ionian island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the doctor's daughter Pelagia falls in love with Captain Antonio Corelli, an Italian officer of the occupying garrison who leads his men in an opera club and plays the mandolin. The island is real and central: the capital at Argostoli where the Italians are based, the port of Sami, Mount Aenos above the villages, and the coast where the fisherman Mandras swims. History closes in with the German massacre of the Italians in 1943 and the great earthquake of 1953.
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The Murderess
Alexandros Papadiamantis
On the poor Aegean island of Skiathos, an old healer and midwife, Hadoula, worn down by a life of hardship and by watching the burden that daughters are to poor families, comes to a terrible conclusion and begins to kill baby girls, then is hunted across the island to her death. Papadiamantis, a son of Skiathos, sets it all on his real island: the cramped town, the herb-strewn hills, the wells and ravines, the mountain chapels, and the sea between the rocks that finally claims her.
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The Third Wedding
Costas Taktsis
In a torrent of gossip, grievance and love, two Athenian women, Nina and the indomitable Ekavi, tell the tangled story of their families across the middle of the twentieth century, through marriages, the German Occupation and the Civil War. The real city is their whole world: the middle-class neighbourhoods of Kypseli and Patissia where the households rise and fall, old Plaka beneath the Acropolis, and the central squares where the famine and the fighting come.
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Z
Vassilis Vassilikos
A thinly fictionalised account of the 1963 murder of the leftist deputy Grigoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki by right-wing thugs with police collusion, and the dogged investigation that exposed the conspiracy. Vassilikos maps the real city: the hall where the Deputy speaks at a peace rally, the central street where a three-wheeled truck runs him down, the hospital where he dies, the courthouse where an honest magistrate unpicks the cover-up, and the waterfront under the shadow of the coming junta.
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Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis
Kazantzakis sets the novel on the coast of Crete, his own island, where the young narrator and the labourer Alexis Zorba reopen a lignite gallery and build a brief life by the sea. The real venture behind it happened across the water in the Messenian Mani. The map keeps both: it anchors the explicit Crete of the book at Heraklion, the author's birthplace, and marks the Peloponnesian mine that actually inspired it.
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