Homage to Thessaloniki

After a career in PR and journalism, Victoria Hislop published her first novel The Island in her mid-forties. A multi-generational saga set against the backdrop of the Spinalonga leper colony in Crete, The Island was by any measure, a publishing sensation.

Her new novel The Thread is a romantic saga entwined with the turbulent 20th century history of Thessaloniki, and continues to reflect a love affair with Greece, that is as deep and passionate as that felt by any non-Greek author writing today.

"Yes, the truth is, I think I'm obsessed with Greece," says Victoria, who I've managed to catch before she heads to Athens from London for the Greek launch of The Thread.

Today Greece is Victoria's second home. She owns a family house on Crete (near Aghios Nikalaos) and speaks Greek fluently. Her three-week tour of Greek cities will promote the new novel and its launch in Thessaloniki will be the most poignant.

The Thread is a tribute to that city and its citizens, and their desperate story that unravelled in the first half of the last century. The new book is Hislop's most ambitious to date. In both its historical scope and in terms of its small 'p' political, as well as romantic narrative, it interweaves the lives of its characters into the backcloth of Greek history over three generations.

The Thread touches on deep and sensitive themes: the effects of the Asia Minor 'Catastrophe', anti-Semitism and the Civil War. As in The Island, Hislop partly tells the story through the voice of the family today, travelling through time, connecting the past with the present.

In the first chapters of The Thread the reader is transported to Thessaloniki harbour in May 1923. A teeming mass of Greek refugees from Turkey pours from a ship, newly swapped for Greece's Muslim population. It is a scene of one of the most painful exchanges of peoples ever conceived. Among them is five-year-old Katerina Sarafoglou. Separated from her mother in their flight from Smyrna, Katerina is adopted by Eugenia, another refugee. When they are allocated a new home, Dimitri Komninos, the son of a rich, authoritarian merchant, is among their neighbours.

The eventual relationship between seamstress Katerina and Dimitri forms the backbone of The Thread. Beside the lovers' narrative, the tortuous story of Thessaloniki is drawn out through the experience of the two families and their friends - Christian, Jewish, and Muslim. "It is a homage to the city," says Hislop, who first visited Thessaloniki five years ago when she was invited by the university to talk about The Island.

Reading about the population exchange convinced the author that the subject would be the starting point for a new novel. "I hadn't realised what a huge impact this exchange had on Greece. I thought if I didn't know about this, then most who read my books also don't know." One of Hislop's favourite pastimes on her visits to the city was to sit in a Niki street cafe and look across the water to Mount Olympus. It was here that the two main characters in The Thread first appeared to her.

"I'm very aware of the different stature, the different style of older people in Mediterranean countries. They're always much smaller, always frail but also strong. I was sitting drinking my lovely coffee, and there was a particular elderly couple on the seafront that I watched surreptitiously, if anything, they're the inspiration for Dimitri and Katerina."