Corfu Literary Festival 2022
By Corfu Literary Festival
Corfu Literary Festival 2022
By Corfu Literary Festival
Here are some books by our fabulous line up of 2022's Festival speakers, to read before or enjoy following this year's events - buying them through this platform not only secures our readers a little discount but also helps support Corfu Literary Festival.
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Professor Peter Frankopan
£16.99 £16.14The No. 1 Sunday Times and international bestseller - a major reassessment of world history in light of the economic and political renaissance in the re-emerging east.
Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
Natalie Haynes
£10.99 £10.44'Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to!' – Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale
A Thousand Ships: Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
Natalie Haynes
£10.99 £10.44'With her trademark passion, wit, and fierce feminism, Haynes gives much-needed voice to the silenced women of the Trojan War. Her thoughtful portraits will linger with you long after the book is finished' - Madeline Miller, Orange Prize winning author of The Song of Achilles and Circe
The Golden Rule: Longlisted for the Women's Prize 2021
Amanda Craig
£8.99 £8.54'A highly enjoyable story about female resilience and finding fulfilment on your own terms' - Sunday Times 'An irresistible summer read' - Guardian Book of the Day
The Lie of the Land: A very good read indeed' Matt Haig
Amanda Craig
£9.99 £9.49'Witty, vicious, dark and unsettling, it's a book that has propelled Craig to her rightful place at the top table of contemporary novelists.' - Observer
Perfect, Stories of the Impossible
Sally Emerson
£14.00 £13.30'Unmissable...This wonderous collection of short stories from best-selling author Sally Emerson injects just the right dose of the supernatural into the everyday. - Tatler
Eurydice Street: A Place In Athens
Sofka Zinovieff
£10.99 £10.44Part translucent biography, part penetrating travelogue, Eurydice Street is Sofka Zinovieff's delightful memoir of settling into life in Athens in the early 2000s.
The House on Paradise Street
Sofka Zinovieff
£9.99'A captivating novel that embraces the last turbulent 70 years of Greek history.' - Mariella Frostrup
Putney
Ms Sofka Zinovieff
£12.99 £12.34'Truly memorable and thought-provoking; throughout, Zinovieff sustains wonderfully perplexing and complex ambiguities. What is love, and what is exploitation? What is truth and what is self-deception? What is righteousness and what is hypocrisy? Can contradictions be simultaneously true? It's a great story and a riveting read. I'll remember the characters forever.' - Louis de Bernières
Sad Little Men: Inside the secretive world that shaped Boris Johnson
Richard Beard
£10.99 £10.44'The most important book I've read this year.' - Adam Rutherford 'Read this book.' - Alastair Campbell 'A really wonderful book.' - Nigella Lawson
The Day That Went Missing
Richard Beard
£9.99 £9.49Winner of the Pen Ackerley Prize 2108 'This captivating book, both heart-rending and jaw-dropping, unfolds like a detective story.' - Daily Mail
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
£9.99 £9.49'An uplifting, poignant novel about regret, hope and second chances.' - David Nicholls, author of One Day
How to Stop Time
Matt Haig
£9.99 £9.49'A fabulous book.' - Stephen Fry 'How to Stop Time is a beautiful, and necessary book. I feel very lucky to have read it. It is magical, intriguing and at times, very sad. A triumph.' - Marian Keyes 'Absolutely terrific.' - Graham Norton
The Comfort Book
Matt Haig
£10.99 £10.44A collection of consolations learned in hard times and suggestions for making the bad days better. 'Profound, witty and uplifting.' - Observer 'Full of eloquent, cogent and positive reminders of the beauty of life.' -Independent
Irreplaceable: The fight to save our wild places
Julian Hoffman
£12.99 £12.34'An impassioned account of the importance of Nature in our lives, and a timely reminder of the need to take action in the face of unprecedented destruction of the natural world.' - The Countryman
The Art of Failing: Notes from the Underdog
Anthony McGowan
£8.99 £8.54‘The funniest book was Anthony McGowan’s The Art of Failing, which alternates self-mocking slapstick with flashes of weirdness reminiscent of Gogol.’ - Observer, Books of the Year
How to Teach Philosophy to Your Dog: A Quirky Introduction to the Big Questions in Philosophy
Anthony McGowan
£10.99 £10.44‘Filled with sparkling insights, a joy from start to finish. In turns witty, brilliant and irreverent, McGowan explains nothing less than the meaning of life – to his dog. If only we were all as lucky as Monty to go for long walks with the author…’ - Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads
Lark
Anthony McGowan
£7.99 £7.59Not just a brilliant non-fiction writer, Anthony McGowan writes children's books so good that this one won the CILIP/Carnegie Medal in 2020. 'Funny, scatological, terrifying, heartwarming and heartbreaking.' - Nicolette Jones, Sunday Times Children's Book of the Week
A Thing of Beauty: Travels in Mythical and Modern Greece
Peter Fiennes
£10.99 £10.44‘Peter Fiennes’s road trip around Greece – engagingly described in A Thing of Beauty – began with a visit to Lord Byron’s house… Fiennes’s tough talk and his down-to-earth refusal to put up with pretentious silliness contributes a lot to the pleasure of the book… [he] is well attuned to the ambivalence of hope.’ - Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement
Lives Between The Lines: A Journey in Search of the Lost Levant
Michael Vatikiotis
£9.99 £9.49Michael Vatikiotis traces the journey of his Greek and Italian forebears from Tuscany, Crete, Hydra and Rhodes, as they made their way to Egypt and the coast of Palestine in search of opportunity. In the process, he reveals a period where the Middle East was a place of ethnic and cultural harmony - where Arabs and Jews rubbed shoulders in bazaars and teashops, intermarried and shared family history. While lines were eventually drawn and people, including Vatikiotis's family, found themselves caught between clashing faiths, contested identities and violent conflict, this intimate and sweeping memoir is a paean to tolerance, offering a nuanced understanding of the lost Levant.
The Painter of Lost Souls
Michael Vatikiotis
£16.04A fast-paced, intensely emotional drama of Indonesian life high and low, set against the tumultuous backdrop of the "reformasi" era, after the fall of Suharto in 1998.
The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells
Sarah Churchwell
£27.99 £26.59'Eye-opening and at times jaw-dropping; a powerful reminder of the prejudices and suffering horrors of the recent past, and a call to arms to learn from the lessons of history. Highly recommended' Peter Frankopan
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe
Sarah Churchwell
£9.99 £9.49Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of some 600 books, all of which claim to uncover the 'real Marilyn'. But the biographies can't agree on many of the most sensational details of the life of the twentieth century's most famous woman. Rather than promising another 'definitive life', Sarah Churchwell's book looks at the writing of Marilyn Monroe's many life stories, comparing the competing versions of some of the key moments in her life; explores how these stories have continued to trivialize a woman we supposedly 'worship', and explains what the stories reveal about our attitudes to sex symbols and icons.
Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream
Sarah Churchwell
£12.99 £12.34'Lively and eminently readable . Churchwell has produced a timely and clearly argued book that makes a clear case for the intellectual parallels between the first third of the 20th century and our own.' - Financial Times
Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell
£12.99 £12.34‘A perfect book to read alongside The Great Gatsby. Excellent.’ - Evening Standard ‘Tells the story crisply and intelligently, judiciously deploying Fitzgerald's eminently quotable literary remains, and also Zelda's, which are often even better, in a sprightly, enjoyable and slightly strange book: part "biography" of the novel, part sketch of the roaring 1920s, part brief account of the second half of Fitzgerald's life.’ - Guardian
Control: Now the major BBC Radio 4 series BAD BLOOD
Adam Rutherford
£12.99'A short, sharp, illuminating overview of the science, politics, uses and abuses of human gene editing.' - Observer Book of the Week 'Weighty and serious but accessible and perfectly pitched. The scholarship is astounding' - Alice Roberts
God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4
Francesca Stavrakopoulou
£14.99 £14.24'Professors of Theology are imagined to be dull, gentle souls. This book, however, is a great rebel shout . . . A book that aims to upend the notion of a cloudy, spiritualised creator . . . instructive, vivid and frequently hilarious.' - Economist 'Stavrakopoulou is no literalist ― indeed, she’s an atheist ― but she maintains that her reading makes far more sense than the traditional ones, and her confident tone never falters.' - The Times
Persian Fire: The First World Empire, Battle for the West - 'Magisterial' Books of the Year, Independent
Tom Holland
£12.99 £12.34A brilliant account of the world's very first clash of civilisations between the Persians and the Greeks in 480BC. 'Confident, fluent and accessible, and with salutary lessons for our own times, this is history at its best.' - The Times
The Snow Geese
William Fiennes
£9.99Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and winner of the Hawthornden Prize, The Snow Geese is a poignant and lyrical hymn to the richness and wonder of the world around us. A unique blend of autobiography, travel and nature writing, this is a classic tale of belonging and the inescapable lure of home. ''A wonderful, binoculared bird odyssey . . . A profoundly moving account of joy returning, of one man's rediscovery of the world by dwelling on some of its beauties.' - Sunday Times
The Music Room
William Fiennes
£9.99 £9.49'William Fiennes's beautifully written memoir of his childhood is like a double painting. On one side of the diptych is a picture of the 700-year-old moated castle near Banbury where he lived. On the other is a portrait of his older brother Richard, who suffered from epilepsy and became increasingly violent, and died aged 41...An outstanding book for rich, quiet contemplation.' - The Times
Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth
Dan Richards
£10.99 £10.44There are still wild places out there on our crowded planet. Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans and deserts.
Winchelsea
Alex Preston
£14.99Recently a popular BBC Book at Bedtime, Winchelsea is the latest novel by our co-found Alex Preston. 'Imagine Daphne du Maurier crossed with Quentin Tarantino, and you will have some idea of just what a thrilling, bloody and heady ride this novel is.' - Tom Holland
This Bleeding City
Alex Preston
£7.99 £7.59'The best thing about Alex Preston's impressive first novel is its wonderfully lucid and compelling telling of the collapse of the markets. Preston was a bond trader but, happily, he's far more concerned with bringing emotional sense to the crash than elucidating financial intricacies...Preston depicts the impending financial crash with a wonderfully sickening inexorability, bringing a heightened consonance to a real-life.' - Observer
The Revelations
Alex Preston
£7.99 £7.59In Alex Preston's second novel, a group of young people are searching for meaning in a dark and directionless world. The Course, a religious movement led by a charismatic priest, seems at first to offer everything the friends have been looking for: a community of bright, thoughtful, beautiful people. But as they are drawn deeper into the Course, money, sex and God collide, threatening to rip them apart.
In Love and War
Alex Preston
£9.99'It's a title befitting an epic, and Preston emphatically delivers in this, his third novel but his first foray into historical fiction. That he's a natural at it is clear...Vividly imagined and richly atmospheric, Preston's dramatic tale propels the reader towards a tense and tragic final showdown.' - Daily Mail
East Side Voices: Essays celebrating East and Southeast Asian identity in Britain
HELENA LEE
£10.99 £10.44'This collection is illuminating, funny, sad, and reveals aspects of Britain that for too long have not been addressed. This is the first but hopefully not the last assemblage of Asian and Southeast Asian writers discussing their experiences of life in Britain. It is an important book and a cracking read.' - Herald
A Taste of Greek Summer: The BRAND NEW Greek Summer romance from author Mandy Baggot
Mandy Baggot
£8.99 £8.54Lydia Broom is living her second-best life. With her dreams of being a chef left in the dust she instead finds solace writing about the dishes she wished she created. When Lydia's sent to Corfu on an assignment, she's excited to see what culinary delights the island has to offer, but nothing seems to tickle her fancy - until she tastes the creations of local cook, Thanos Nicolaidis. Get ready for the hottest Greek meze on the menu as Lydia and Thanos discover that amid the sirtaki dancing and the smashing plates, they might just be cooking up their very own love story.
Looking for the Durrells: A heartwarming, feel-good and uplifting novel bringing the Durrells back to life
MELANIE HEWITT
£12.99 £12.34After a year that sees a broken-off engagement and the death of her beloved father, Penny is desperate to get away. Fulfilling a childhood dream, she sets off on a month-long pilgrimage to Corfu--an island idyll she knows only through the pages of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. On the island, Penny quickly finds herself drawn into the lives of a tight-knit circle of strangers. Exploring--searching for the places the Durrells knew decades before--she makes unexpected discoveries about the hopes, fears, and secrets of the people living there today. And as strangers start to be friends, lives past and present become entwined in ways none of them could have predicted. . .
The Summer Trip: escape to sun-soaked Corfu with this must-read romance
Isabelle Broom
£7.99 £7.59A gorgeous and evocative novel about three sisters and a life-changing summer in Corfu. 'Gloriously escapist, unashamedly romantic, witty and hugely enjoyable.' - Sunday Mirror
All the Birds, Singing
Evie Wyld
£9.99 £9.49Winner of the Miles Franklin Award Winner of the Encore Award Winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Award 'Unsettling, dark and extraordinarily fresh. It feels eccentrically, wonderfully British… An inimitable, original new voice. Can’t wait to read more.' - The Times
The Bass Rock: ‘A rising star of British fiction’ Sunday Telegraph
Evie Wyld
£9.99 £9.49'Daring, heartfelt, explosive.' - Daisy Johnson 'A vividly imagined portrait.' - Sunday Times 'Dark, disturbing and very sophisticated.' - William Boyd 'Wonderfully subtle and magnificently savage.' - Claire Fuller