{"id":28226,"date":"2019-08-28T15:42:36","date_gmt":"2019-08-28T15:42:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.com\/?p=28226"},"modified":"2019-08-28T15:42:36","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T15:42:36","slug":"victoria-hislops-cretan-love-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/victoria-hislops-cretan-love-affair\/","title":{"rendered":"Victoria Hislop\u2019s Cretan love affair"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo: Bill Waters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(from cretamaris.gr<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Victoria Hislop is the world\u2019s most popular novelist writing about Greece today, and this summer sees the publication of her latest book\u00a0Those Who Are Loved<\/em>. Already topping best-seller lists in the UK, it\u2019s looking like it will be her most successful book to date. Of course it was\u00a0The Island<\/em>that started it all nearly 15 years ago; the historical novel that told the story of Spinalonga sold 1.5 million copies in the UK, 600,000 copies in France, and became a huge international bestseller. In total, Victoria\u2019s novels have been translated into more than 30 languages worldwide, and have sold more than six million copies.<\/p>\n

No wonder Hollywood approached Victoria to turn\u00a0The Island<\/em>\u00a0into a feature film. Instead, keen to keep the story authentically retold, she decided to work with the Greek broadcaster Mega, who re-created it as a 26-part drama series\u00a0To Nisi<\/em>. The rest as they say is history; it became the most successful television series ever broadcast in Greece.<\/p>\n

These days Victoria divides her time between London and Crete, and every summer she\u2019s to be found at her second home \u2013 the gorgeous house she had built a decade ago in Aghios Nikolaos.\u00a0 Victoria\u2019s love affair with Greece goes way back; she first arrived as a teenager on holiday with her mum and sister in the 1970s, but it was yearly visits, later with husband Ian and her children, most often to the Agios Nikolaos area, that sewed the seeds of her passion for Greece, and Crete in particular.<\/p>\n

Following on from the success of\u00a0The Island<\/em>,\u00a0The Sunrise<\/em>,\u00a0The Thread\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Cartes Postales from Greece<\/em>, Victoria Hislop\u2019s latest novel is set against the backdrop of Greece in World War II and the traumatic civil war that followed.\u00a0 Like\u00a0The Island<\/em>, the book is an epic tale that reflects Greece\u2019s turbulent past \u2013 a subject that English-speaking audiences are obviously keen to find out about.\u00a0Those Who Are Loved<\/em>\u00a0jumped to number one in the UK bestseller lists on its launch in June, and judging from the feedback, Victoria\u2019s readers are adamant that it\u2019s her best so far.<\/p>\n

Speaking to the Creta Maris blog, Victoria says her latest novel exploring a heartbreaking period of Greek history is very different from\u00a0The Island<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cIslands always have something unique. Both Spinalonga and Makronisos (which was used as a prison camp) were islands of exile but in different ways,\u00a0unique environments with very different uses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure people will see similarities between the two stories \u2013 perhaps one of the most obvious being that often people are faced with immense challenges through no fault of their own, and it\u2019s how you deal with such difficulties that shows us who we are, and how overcoming them make us stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fluent in Greek (she\u2019s had private lessons for years) there\u2019s nothing Victoria values more than the time she spends in Crete. It\u2019s much more than a holiday home for this British philhellene, who takes great pride in the Agios Nikolaos community she\u2019s now a part of. Victoria has just arrived in Crete after a hugely successful tour of the UK promoting her new book, and she will stay enjoying the Cretan summer until September.<\/p>\n

By the way, if you want to travel in Victoria\u2019s footsteps when taking a trip to Spinalonga, head for the atmospheric Carob Tree Taverna in Plaka. It\u2019s a long-time favourite of hers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(from cretamaris.gr) Victoria Hislop is the world\u2019s most popular novelist writing about Greece today, and this summer sees the publication of her latest book\u00a0Those Who Are Loved. Already topping best-seller […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}