Three Summers
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Three sisters, three summers . . . This coming-of-age novel offers a “sweet, light, and dreamy escape” to one of Athens’ oldest suburbs before WW2 (Lit Hub).
“Following Woolf, [Liberaki] captures life as it is lived in small ‘moments of being,’ especially of female domestic rituals.” —Electric Literature
Three Summers is the story of three sisters growing up in the countryside near Athens before the Second World War. Living in a big old house surrounded by a beautiful garden are Maria, the oldest sister, as sexually bold as she is eager to settle down and have a family of her own; 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 figure out their parents and other members of the tribe of adults, take note of the weird ways of friends and neighbors, worry about and wonder who they are. Now back in print after twenty years, Karen Van Dyck’s translation captures all the light and warmth of this modern Greek classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Three sisters come of age in the genteel milieu of prewar Greece in Liberaki's dreamy, modernist gem of a novel, her first translated into English. Narrated by the youngest, impulsive and imaginative 16-year-old Katerina, the story brackets a period that will prove decisive in the lives of the sisters, who have grown up with their divorced mother, maiden aunt, and grandfather in a country house near Athens. Twenty-year-old Maria gets engaged to the lovestruck Marios, though her embrace of a conventional destiny coincides with the feeling that "from this day on the sacrifices would begin." At 18, the restrained and virginal Infanta is at an intersection in her relationship with Nikitas, a childhood friend she can't bring herself to kiss, though "she wanted him the way she wanted to fall into the cistern on hot days." And Katerina dreams of David, a half-English neighbor and astronomer, who is also pursued by the older, married Laura Parigori. In Van Dyck's translation, Katerina shifts seamlessly between her own perspective and the thoughts and dreams of her family and friends, painting a world in which women are both cosseted and neglected, free to imagine "thousands of lives," and longing for a true and tangible connection with another: "something like lightning... you feel it before you have time to think." This is an elegant and striking novel.
