The Captive Sun
Karafilly, Irena

RRP
A$29.99

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER IN GREECE

Calliope Adham is a schoolmistress in the Greek village of Molyvos when Hitler's army invades in 1941. Young and linguistically gifted, she is promptly recruited by the Germans, to work as their liaison officer. It is the beginning of a personal and national saga that will last well over thirty years.

Calliope's wartime duties bring her into close contact with a Wehrmacht officer named Lieutenant Umbreit. Their improbable friendship blossoms despite Calliope's clandestine work for the Resistance, in a fishing village seething with dread and suspicion.

Amid privation and death, village hostility finally erupts, but the bond between Calliope and Umbreit survives the Occupation, taking unforeseeable turns. Their relationship continues through several tumultuous decades, as Greece is ravaged by civil war, oppressed by military dictatorship, and finally liberated in the mid 1970s.

The Captive Sun is a haunting novel, weaving the private and the historic into a vivid tapestry of Greek island life. An epic page-turner, it chronicles the story of an extraordinary woman and her lifelong struggle against social and political tyranny.

Author Information

Irena Karafilly is a Canadian-educated writer, journalist, and aphorist, whose short fiction has won several literary prizes, including the National Magazine Award and the CBC Literary Award. Her work has been broadcast, anthologised, and published in several countries, in both commercial and literary magazines; her articles have appeared in numerous newspapers, including the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune. Karafilly currently divides her time between Greece and Canada, where she has published three acclaimed books. The Captive Sun is her first novel.