Those Who Are Loved

Athens, 1941. The German flag flies over the Acropolis. The occupation begins with looting and ends with famine — a winter in which tens of thousands of Athenians starve on the streets of their city, while the occupiers eat well. Themis, a teenager from a bourgeois Athens family, watches her city transform and her family fracture along the lines of politics that have divided Greece for decades: her grandmother is a monarchist, her brother a Communist, and the coming civil war will make these positions fatal.

Those Who Are Loved spans sixty years of Greek history — from the occupation through the civil war that follows liberation, through the junta years of the 1960s and 1970s, to the democracy that emerges. It is Hislop’s most politically complex novel, and the one that engages most directly with the specific trauma of twentieth-century Greek history, which was not simply German occupation but the subsequent years in which Greeks killed each other in a civil war that NATO and the British backed one side of.

Themis — the novel’s protagonist across all these decades — joins the resistance, is imprisoned, loses people she loves, and survives to old age with the memory of all of it. She is the most fully realised female protagonist in Hislop’s work.

Reading Guides

• Victoria Hislop Books in Order
• Where to Start with Victoria Hislop
• Books About Greece

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Those Who Are Loved apart: The WWII occupation famine material is rendered with genuine weight; The political complexity of the Greek left-right divide is handled honestly; and Themis is her most fully developed female protagonist. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Those Who Are Loved give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The WWII famine in Greece — one of the war’s most underreported catastrophes. The Greek civil war as a wound that shaped the country for decades. How political division fractures families. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Victoria Hislop’s prose in Those Who Are Loved is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The scope across sixty years means some periods feel compressed. The civil war sections may be unfamiliar to non-Greek readers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers visiting Athens; fans of Greek history; WWII historical fiction readers

The Greek Famine of 1941-42

The famine that descended on Athens and Greece in the winter of 1941-42 — triggered by the German and Italian occupation and the Allied naval blockade — was one of the worst civilian catastrophes of the Second World War in Europe, and one of the least known outside Greece. Estimates of the death toll vary, but the most credible figures suggest that between 100,000 and 300,000 Greeks died of starvation and related causes during the occupation, with the worst deaths concentrated in Athens and the urban centres of the mainland.

Hislop renders this famine with an unflinching directness that is unusual in her work. The bodies on the street, the soup kitchens, the social collapse — the material requires a register more austere than she typically employs, and she meets that requirement. For many non-Greek readers, Those Who Are Loved is their first encounter with the occupation famine as a narrative subject, and the novel’s insistence on its scale and specific horror is a form of historical reclamation.

The Greek Civil War

Less familiar still to most non-Greek readers is the civil war that followed liberation in 1944-45 and intensified through 1946-1949: a conflict between the Communist-aligned ELAS resistance and the British-backed and later American-backed government forces, which killed tens of thousands and ended with the defeat of the left and a pattern of political repression that shaped Greek life for decades. The junta that seized power in 1967 was in part a product of this history.

Themis’s trajectory through the resistance, imprisonment, and the decades of political fracture that follow takes her through all of this. Hislop does not simplify the history: she acknowledges the violence on both sides of the civil war, and the specific brutalities of the left-wing partisans as well as the right-wing forces. This evenhandedness has occasionally drawn criticism from Greek readers with strong political commitments, but it is part of what makes the novel more than a partisan account.

Themis and Hislop’s Female Protagonists

Across Hislop’s novels, her female protagonists have become progressively more politically engaged and historically central. Themis is the fullest realisation of this development: a woman who chooses her political commitments actively, who joins the resistance not because of personal loss but because of conviction, and who pays a specific price for those convictions across decades. She is the most fully inhabited female protagonist in Hislop’s work, and the novel’s length — spanning six decades of her life — is what her portrait requires.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Hislop’s most politically complex novel — a Greek family’s story across sixty years of occupation, civil war, and dictatorship, told with her characteristic emotional directness.