One enterprising couple is on the verge of launching the most striking hotel in a region where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live in peace. You must pay the rent!" the evil villain roared, twirling his diabolical mustache. He was her landlord, and he was an impatient man. While the history of the city and Greece as a whole was something new and informative the author was inconsistent again - some major events took up several chapters while others were glossed over in a few paragraphs. It was too obvious she was simply interested in using the events to interweave the characters' lives.

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. As a youthful woman, her rage emanating from corroborators of the Nazi regime forces her to join the communists.

Richard E. Grant's Spanish reading list

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.” Victoria Hislop is a born storyteller and her love and passion for Greece comes through loud and clear with every word she writes.” ★★★★★ reader review for THE FIGURINE. All of this was so shaming at the time it had been swept under the carpet for years, adds Hislop, who, having been a journalist, is imbued with lively curiosity about her own family’s clandestine past as well as that of others. “Everyone has a story to tell about their family secrets,” she insists, gently quizzing me about mine. Like the heroine of The Return, Hislop originally went to Granada to learn to dance because she wanted to write a novel about dance; then, like Sonia, she stumbled across stories about the civil war. “I love music and I love to dance. I even dance in my kitchen when I’m cooking. I also had issues with inconsistencies in characters, like the fact that Hislop makes a point of saying the twins have "little in common" besides their looks, before going on to say they both want to be tobacco graders, they both dislike school and have no interest in their mother's weaving, and later on they are practically finishing each other's sentences.

Roman započinje pričom o velikom požaru koji je pogodio Solun 1917.godine i proteže do sve do današnjice. Kako je taj požar odredio sudbine mnogih porodica, kako hrišćanskih, tako i muslimanskih, tako je i dolazak ll Svjetskog rata pogodio solunske Jevreje. Grad koji je nekada bio zajednica svih vjera, samo je u nekoliko godina to prestao biti, muslimani su protjerani u Tursku, a Jevreji su protjerani u poljske logore početkom ll Svjetskog rata. U vrtlogu tih povijesnih dešavanja pratimo sudbine različih porodica, različitih statusa i vjera.

I am afraid I really didn't get along with this book at all. It is fairly easy to read and has some interesting subject matter but I feel it takes a scatter gun approach, putting in a little bit of everything, and failing to hit any target. The book covers 70 years of Cretan history and 4 generations of a family. We get information on leprosy, the way it was treated, medically, socially and officially. Hislop includes a range of incidents that took place on and around Spinalonga, which appear to have come from newspaper reports of the time. One of these involves an inmate of Spinalonga being shot by a German soldier when trying to swim to the mainland. This incident is briefly given context after it is told but no indications of the issues or the character of the individual are given previously. I like my novels to be more integrated and feel Hislop is just cobbling together bits of flotsam and jetsam that she has come across in her research. Rather than tell a more restricted tale of life on Spinalonga she ranges wider and tries to develop a love triangle between two sisters and a local Lothario. Nevertheless, I strongly recommend "The Thread" and Victoria Hoslop 's writing as I always admire her research, her deep look even on secondary historical events and her details in people's culture/way of life. Each word held its magic. They were like brushstrokes painting the landscape of the city, each one helping to build up a picture of the whole.” 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 primary subject matter of the book was well researched and very interesting and original - that of the fate of Leprosy sufferers in pre-war and wartime Greece. I found this aspect of the book very interesting, the experimental treatments, the descriptions of how they organised their lives on the island and set up a democracy, the emotions surrounding being forcibly taken away from your families and made to live in isolation. I didn't know a lot about leprosy before reading this book, to me it is a biblical illness which is slightly distasteful and I didn't realise that patients sometimes lived in these isolated communities for years before the disfigurement and death happened. I also liked reading about the undercurrents of class prejudice in the face of this. I quite liked the character of Maria, even though she was quite a passive character and I usually prefer more sparky female protagonists, she was characterised quite well.

I don’t like silence. To me both music and dance are more important than words,” she confesses, adding that she also plays the violin, usually in duets. “It really is unlike anything else one does.” Beautifully imagined, well-researched and evocatively told, Victoria Hislop’s The Island recreates a leper colony of the 1930s and follows its inmates and neighbors on the Island of Crete through the Second World War to the present day. The theme of searching for identity is well-served as the author follows characters whose identities have been stolen by disease—some losing their physical self-image, others half-destroyed mentally by loss of family and friends. The agony of ostracism, the fear of ever-present death and the struggle to create a life where life is already failing are made chillingly real. The kindness and cruelty of strangers threads the tale. And the modern-day story of a young woman searching for her own identity, seeking her past and her future, makes a pleasing wrapper. Hislop’s love for Greece shines and transports readers through space and time to a brilliantly drawn world”A warm, lively conversationalist, she is no stranger to long-buried secrets herself and it’s tempting to play the amateur psychologist and suggest that this is why she writes so well about such matters since they echo her own past. In the wake of the military coup led by General Franco, in 1936, the three-year civil war devastated the country,” says Hislop, adding that many Scots made a notable contribution, fighting for the Republican cause, and her book is unashamedly biased anyway, since it’s written from the Left-wing perspective of the war. “When I read from the book in England at author events, I always have to explain the context. People in Scotland never need that. They ask such intelligent questions and they always tell me things I never knew,” she says. She also worked in public relations and as a journalist before eventually becoming a full-time novelist.

MEGA και εξακολουθεί να μας αγαπάει - βέβαια μια Βρετανή θεωρεί λογικό να πληρώσει φόρο ιδιοκτησίας και στο MEGA την προσκυνούσαν για την τιμή που τους έκανε να τους δώσει το βιβλίο της - γενικά νομίζω ότι αντιμετωπίζεται με μεγάλο σεβασμό από όλο τον κόσμο και γι' αυτό εξακολουθεί να μας αγαπάει, άσε που κι εμείς μη γνωρίσουμε φιλέλληνα, τεμενάδες του κάνουμε - κλείνω κάπου εδώ την παρένθεση για να πω και δυο λόγια για το βιβλίο!)

However, as I said, I absolutely adored it. It was a bit slow to get going but after a little while I was completely hooked and couldn't put it down. i totally loved this book!!!! I read it in 2 days (not on holidays) so now i really need a long hour sleep!!!! I had ages to be so completely into a book and living in agony for the characters, even though we knew the end of their story from the beginning.