Three Summers

Margarita Liberaki, Karen Van Dyck

Book cover for Three Summers
Book cover for Three Summers

Three Summers

Three Summers

Margarita Liberaki, Karen Van Dyck

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Description

With a new introduction by Polly Samson, Sunday Times bestselling author of A THEATRE FOR DREAMERS

'Gorgeous... the written equivalent of lying in the sun eating figs' India Knight, Sunday Times

'That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria's had cherries around the rim, Infanta's had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. . .'


Three Summers
is a warm and tender tale of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a ramshackle old house with their divorced mother are flirtatious, hot-headed Maria, beautiful but distant Infanta, and dreamy and rebellious Katerina, through whose eyes the story is mostly observed. Over three summers, the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, try to understand the strange ways of adults and decide what kind of adults they hope to become.

'The sun has disappeared from books these days... You are one of those who pass it on' Albert Camus to Margarita Liberaki

'The literary equivalent of a sun-soaked holiday in Greece' Culture Whisper

'A leisurely, large-hearted coming-of-age novel, earthy and innocent, nostalgic and beautifully rendered' Kirkus

'A dreamy, cinematic tapestry of Greek village life' NPR

About the Author

Margarita Liberaki (1919-2001) was born in Athens and raised by her grandparents, who ran the Fexis bookstore and publishing house. In addition to Three Summers, she wrote two further novels, The Other Alexander (1950) and The Mystery (1976); a number of plays, including Candaules' Wife (1955) and The Danaïds (1956), part of a cycle she called Mythical Theater; several screenplays, including Jules Dassin's Phaedra (1962) and Diaspora (1999), about Greek intellectuals in exile in Paris during the junta; and a translation of Treasure Island (2000). Three Summers is now a standard part of Greek and Cypriot public education; it was adapted as a television miniseries in 1995.

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature at Columbia University. She writes on modern Greek and diaspora literature and on gender and translation. She has edited or co-edited several volumes of poetry, including A Century of Greek Poetry (2004); The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present (2010); and, for NYRB Poets, Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry (2017). Her translations have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Asymptote, and The Baffler.

Critical Reviews

"A leisurely, largehearted coming-of-age novel, earthy and innocent, nostalgic and beautifully rendered." --Kirkus

"Liberaki . . . certainly wrote unlike others of her generation. . . . [Three Summers] pushed the bounds of the possible: juggling narrative voices and modes, upending expectations for a conventional narrative arc, folding scenes of teenage sex into a book published in 1946." --Karen Emmerich, Public Books

"Sweet, light, and a dreamy escape . . . The book is so transporting to early adolescence, but with fresher strawberries than you ever got to eat!" --Lit Hub

"Over and above . . . innovation in the form of the Greek novel, Liberaki also made what we might consider a feminist political contribution to Greek letters. Following Woolf, she captures life as it is lived in small 'moments of being, ' especially of female domestic rituals . . . translating these private moments into the public language that had effectively been forbidden to Greek women." --Niko Maragos, Electric Literature

"Makes for an appealing and quite rich novel of young women's lives--with interesting secondary characters and stories, too--with some creative twists and touches by Liberaki in how she presents and unfolds her tale. . . . the writing is strong and often arresting. A nice piece of work." --The Complete Review

"In this unforgettable novel, lush and evocative passages are interspersed with candid, astringent, and often unsettling insights about adolescence, desire, and the mysterious web of human relationships. Margarita Liberaki's sensuousness has an edge, and her tartness has a compelling sweetness. Enthralled, the reader moves deeper and deeper into her summery world." --Rachel Hadas

"This cinematic, sun-drenched novel about innocence and experience depicts a vanished era of bourgeois pleasures against the gardens and olive groves of one of Athens's oldest suburbs. The mores of Athenian society are in tension with the drives and abundance of the Greek landscape itself: even the orderly pistachio orchards, with their male and female trees yearning for communion, vibrate with sex, heat, color, flavor, and scent. Karen Van Dyck's translation vividly reenacts Liberaki's color-saturated prose." --A.E. Stallings

Publishing Information

Publisher: New York Review of Books
Pub date: 2019-07-09
Length: 264 pages

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