The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its
beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter
the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its
shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical,
heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the
island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an island
filled with gods, " writes Dr. Iannis, Cephallonia's healer and
fledgling historian. And though the people who fill the island in 1940
may be less divine than their Olympian forebears, they are nonetheless
divinely human, and none more so than the doctor's daughter, Pelagia.
Willful, proud, independent, and beautiful, Pelagia finds herself
between two men: Mandras, a handsome young fisherman, besotted with love
for her but determined to permanently secure her love (and a dowry from
her father) by finding "something to get to grips with" when he joins
the resistance; and Captain Corelli, a charming, mandolin-playing,
exceedingly reluctant officer of the Italian garrison that establishes
the Axis presence on the island. Corelli is thought slightly mad in his
passion for music and the gentleness of his troops' "occupation" of
Cephallonia. Yet his madness quickly begins to make life seem more
"various, rich, and strange" for everyone who encounters him -
especially, and most confusingly, for Pelagia... But with the arrival of
the Germans and then of the Communists, life on the island becomes more
chaotic and barbaric, more certainly a part of the process by which
"history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then again as tragedy."
Pelagia's life, once rife with possibility, an idyll of time,becomes a
long search for something fine and lasting amid loss and separation,
deprivation and fear. Her story of love found and changed and misplaced,
and the story of the life she shares with the people of Cephallonia - a
life permanently altered by the war and its brutal after
