The novel The Captive Sun by author Irena Karafilly has become a national best-seller in Greece.
The author, who was born in the Urals to a Jewish Holocaust survivor and a Russian Orthodox mother, lives in Greece where her two novels were published and says her novels centre around beleaguered Greek villagers.
The Captive Sun is a novel about young, strong-willed, and recently widowed Calliope Adrham. She is schoolmistress in the village of Molyvos when Hitler’s army invades Greece in 1941. Well read and linguistically gifted, she is promptly recruited by the Germans, who force her to act 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 Lieutenant Lorenz Umbreit, the Wehrmacht officer in command of her village. 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, the villagers’ hostility finally erupts, but the bond between Calliope Adham and Lorenz Umbreit survives the Occupation, taking unforeseeable turns. Their complex, defiant relationship continues through several tumultuous decades, as Greece is ravaged by civil war, oppressed by military dictatorship, and finally liberated in the mid 1970s.
A best-seller in Greece, The Captive Sun is a haunting, sumptuous novel, weaving the private and the historic into a vivid tapestry of Greek island life. At once informative and spellbinding, it chronicles the story of an extraordinary woman and her lifelong struggle against social and political tyranny.
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.