Here is the portrait of an extraordinary - yet in many ways typical - English couple, as seen through the eyes of a fascinated, ouzo-guzzling Greek narrator, reminiscing on a sun-drenched beach.

It is a woman's world, where human warmth and friendships matter more than abstract ideals." "The Greek work for a novel is mythistorema, a word that combines myth and history.

In scene embedded within scene, Red Dyed Hair spins a tale of social and personal cowardice and treachery against a distant backdrop of courage betrayed at the cost of death.

The extravagant melodrama of Dimitra's rhetoric often becomes a caricature of dialectic reasoning, a comic version of double-think paring reality to make it fit within the confines of wishful thinking and self-righteousness.

Dido Soteriou's novel - a perennial best-seller in Greece since it first appeared in 1962 - tells the story of Manolis Axiotis, a poor but resourceful villager born near the ancient ruins of Ephesus.

"This work of Ritsos, is it a novel with an emphatic question-mark added by the poet himself?