Most often we see events through the eyes of Iannis, or Pelagia, or Corelli, but free indirect style gives us the thoughts of many others, from Mina, the mad girl who is to be "cured" by Saint Gerasimos, to Lieutenant Weber, the "good Nazi", confused by the habits of his Italian allies. A teenage recruit to the resistance youth organisation during the Italian fascist and Nazi German occupations of the island - his father was imprisoned by the Germans after a collaborator’s tip-off - Eleftheratos was forced into political exile during the ensuing civil war and spent 11 years working his way around the world, from Mao’s China to Ethiopia and Australia, where he picked up the nickname Lefty Freeman. For many of the older generation, who lived through the events described in de Bernières’s book, his story is a slur on the record of the Greek resistance to the Nazis and a mish-mash of distortions and untruths about their island’s wartime history.

She starts working on a bedcover and a waistcoat, though she struggles with the crochet as her mother died before teaching her any of those female skills.

A lengthy read but I honestly could have kept on going - so much interesting history on the Greeks, Italians and Germans in WW2 that I was unaware of. Podimatas - who between 1946 and 1971 spent a total of 17 years in prison or camps without trial for his political activity - weeps as he tells the story. Yet the success of De Bernières's novel is to find in narrative variety not confusion, but comedy and consolation. He tells Corelli that Pelagia has a dark and mysterious other side, as all Greeks do, and cautions him against making plans. Unfortunately without giving too much away there are moments in the novel that rely on a plot contrivances that feel unearned.

There’s also a lot of talking, too much of it for my liking, and while there are plenty of references to goats throughout, I was expecting it to have some sort of payoff instead of just feeling like a wasted metaphor. Sure, its pretty much the same story, but the beauty of the book is in De Berniere's writing style: poetic, vivid, and simply sublime! This is a big thing for Cephalonia,” declares Kevin Loader, one of the film’s producers, as he suns himself outside a quayside Sami cafe, surveying a mocked-up blackened bell tower used in the previous day’s shoot.Though they used to fight about politics, as the war moves towards Greece, the three band together for the sake of their country. Corelli and Pelagia spend as much time as they can kissing, talking about the future, and riding a motorcycle around the island. By contrast, the main Greek resistance organisation, ELAS - which, according to the German army’s own records, killed more than 8,000 German soldiers in little over a year, tied down tens of thousands more and controlled 80% of the country when Hitler withdrew - is depicted as a gang of torturers, ignorant demagogues and cowards, who spent the war “doing absolutely nothing” except stealing food from peasants and murdering guerillas from smaller rival, British-backed resistance groups.

Louis de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a historical fiction that encompasses symbolism, character development and evolving relationships with a look at WWII that is frequently overlooked, the disrupted but mundane lives of those touched by the war in less horrific ways than concentration camps and mass executions.

For his pains, he was persecuted and imprisoned in the 50s and 60s, and his son, now a professor at Imperial College in London, was forced to study abroad.

This resulted in a conflict that lasted several days in which local Greeks fought alongside Italians but ultimately lost.if you've seen the film, then you might be thinking that this book is just another (highly cheesy) tale of romance with a little hollywood drama mixed in. It uses fragments of Italian, French, German (and transliterated Greek), but mostly it has to represent the different languages, and the mutual misunderstandings, of the characters in a language that none of them are using: English. They belonged, he explains, to a German soldier he shot in an ambush of two troop carriers on the road between Sami and Aghia Efimia. She fetches Mandras’s mother Drosoula and the two women attend to Mandras's many ailments, which makes Pelagia realize she wants to be a doctor.