Best Books Set in Greece: Essential Fiction and Nonfiction
The best books set in Greece — from Zorba the Greek and Captain Corelli's Mandolin to My Family and Other Animals. Essential reading for Greece lovers.
Greece has inspired English literature since Byron and the Romantic poets, but the books that set their stories in contemporary or near-contemporary Greece have a different quality from the classical tradition: they are interested in Greece not as the source of Western civilisation but as a living place, with specific light, specific landscapes, specific people. The best fiction set in Greece uses the country’s combination of beauty, history, and isolation — particularly its islands — as a setting for stories about vitality, occupation, love, and the relationship between the intellectual and the physical life.
The Essential List
Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis (1946)
The defining Greek novel of the twentieth century. Kazantzakis’s portrait of Alexis Zorba — uneducated, infinitely alive, equally enthusiastic about work, women, food, and catastrophe — is simultaneously a character study and a philosophical argument: that Zorba’s unreflective embrace of experience is more authentic than the narrator’s bookish hesitation. Set on Crete, with a brief early section on the mainland, the novel captures the specific quality of Greek landscape — its harshness and beauty — and the contrast between traditional and modern Greek ways of life.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis de Bernières (1994)
The most widely read novel about Greece in English. De Bernières’s account of the Italian and German occupation of Cephalonia (1941–44) uses the love story between Pelagia and Corelli to humanise a historical event — the Italian Acqui Division’s massacre after the armistice — that remains inadequately known. The novel’s tone is difficult to sustain: at once comic (the early chapters are almost farcical) and tragic (the massacre sequence is devastating). The island itself — the landscape, the food, the specific social world of Cephalonia before the war — is as fully realised as any character.
My Family and Other Animals — Gerald Durrell (1956)
The most joyful of the Greek books. Durrell’s account of his Corfu childhood — his obsessive collecting of island fauna, the eccentricities of his family (particularly his elder brother Lawrence, already an aspiring writer), the specific beauty of the island in the 1930s — is irresistibly warm and funny. The book is less about Greece than about the experience of growing up in a particular place, with particular people, with a particular intensity of perception; but the Corfu setting — the light, the landscape, the local characters — is inseparable from that experience.
Three Greeces, Three Islands
It is no accident that all three of these books are island books — Crete, Cephalonia, Corfu — because the Greek island is one of literature’s great natural stages. An island concentrates everything: a bounded community where every character must eventually meet every other, a landscape that presses on daily life rather than sitting behind it, and an isolation that turns history’s arrivals — a new employer, an occupying army, an eccentric English family — into transformative events. Each book exploits this differently. Kazantzakis uses Crete’s harshness as a moral landscape, a place where Zorba’s philosophy of full-blooded living is tested against rock, weather, and village cruelty. De Bernières uses Cephalonia’s beauty as tragic counterpoint, an Eden into which the twentieth century’s worst machinery arrives by landing craft. Durrell uses Corfu as pure paradise, a garden observed with a naturalist’s precision before the war that would end it.
Read together, the three books also span the emotional range of modern Greek experience as outsiders and insiders have written it: Kazantzakis the Cretan writing Greece from within its own philosophical tradition; de Bernières the Englishman reconstructing a Greek catastrophe with a researcher’s care; Durrell the transplanted child for whom Greece was simply the shape of the world. The triangulation is the value — no single perspective would give you the place.
The History Beneath the Beauty
Readers who come to these books for Mediterranean atmosphere are often surprised by how much hard history they carry, and a little background sharpens all three. The Greece of these novels is not the stable tourist destination of the present; it is a country that endured Ottoman rule into living memory, catastrophic wars, brutal occupation, and civil conflict. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin turns on a real atrocity — the German massacre of thousands of Italian soldiers of the Acqui Division on Cephalonia in September 1943, after Italy’s armistice with the Allies — an event that remains far less known than its scale deserves, and which the novel did more than any history book to bring to international attention. Zorba the Greek is shadowed by the older violence of village honour codes and by Crete’s long history of resistance and reprisal; its most shocking scene, the stoning of the widow, is the novel’s reminder that the vitality Kazantzakis celebrates coexists with communal cruelty. Even Durrell’s sunlit Corfu idyll is framed by what the reader knows and the family does not: the 1930s are ending, and the paradise has an expiry date. The lesson the three books teach together is that Greek beauty is never merely scenic — it is beauty with history pressing against it, which is precisely why it moves us more than postcard prettiness ever could.
Beyond These Three
Each of these books opens a door worth walking through. If Zorba converts you to Kazantzakis, his The Last Temptation of Christ and Freedom and Death extend the same wrestling between flesh and spirit onto larger canvases. If Durrell’s Corfu enchants you, the rest of his Corfu trilogy continues the family comedy, while his brother Lawrence Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell gives the same island in an adult, lyrical register — the rare case of two great books about one small place written from inside the same household. And readers gripped by the wartime Cephalonia of de Bernières have a natural next step in the literature of Greece’s 1940s, among the most dramatic and least-read chapters of the Second World War in Europe. Greece rewards deep reading the way it rewards slow travel: the first visit gives you the light and the sea, and every return gives you more of what lies beneath them.
Reading Order Recommendations
New to Greece fiction: My Family and Other Animals → Captain Corelli’s Mandolin → Zorba the Greek.
Literary focus: Zorba the Greek → Captain Corelli’s Mandolin → My Family and Other Animals.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best book set in Greece to start with?
My Family and Other Animals (1956) by Gerald Durrell is the most accessible and joyful starting point — Durrell's childhood years on the island of Corfu in the 1930s, narrated with irresistible warmth and comedy. The book is as much about the natural world (Durrell's obsessive collecting of island fauna) as it is about Greece, but the Corfu setting — the light, the landscape, the local characters — gives it its atmosphere. Zorba the Greek (1946) by Nikos Kazantzakis is the essential literary starting point — the relationship between the narrator and the irrepressible Zorba, set on Crete.
What is Zorba the Greek about?
Zorba the Greek (1946) by Nikos Kazantzakis follows an unnamed narrator — a bookish Greek intellectual — who travels to Crete to open a lignite mine and employs Alexis Zorba, an uneducated, passionately alive labourer who becomes his philosophical opposite and the novel's central force. Zorba eats, drinks, dances, loves women, and embraces catastrophe with equal enthusiasm; the narrator is tentative, cerebral, and perpetually aware of all the reasons not to act. The novel is about the contrast between vitality and intellectualism, between living and thinking about living.
What is Captain Corelli's Mandolin about?
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994) by Louis de Bernières follows the occupation of the Greek island of Cephalonia by Italian and German forces during World War II. The central relationship is between Pelagia, a young Greek woman, and Captain Antonio Corelli, an Italian officer who is charming, music-loving, and fundamentally decent, who is billeted in her father's house. The novel is simultaneously a love story, a portrait of occupation, and an account of the Italian massacre on Cephalonia after the Italian armistice — one of the war's less-known atrocities. The most widely read novel about Greece in English.
What is My Family and Other Animals about?
My Family and Other Animals (1956) by Gerald Durrell follows the Durrell family's five years on the island of Corfu in the 1930s — from the eccentric viewpoint of ten-year-old Gerry, who spends most of his time collecting insects, scorpions, geckos, and any other animal he can find. The human family (his widowed mother, his brother Lawrence the aspiring writer, his sister Margo, and his brother Leslie) provide comic relief from Gerry's obsessions; the Corfu setting — the olive trees, the clear water, the local characters — provides one of the most vivid portraits of a Mediterranean island in English literature.
