Days of Alexandria
Publisher
:
V. Hamy
Parution date
:
EAN
:
9782878583366
Description
***Sold more than 30,000 copies in Greece***
Like a summer sun that impregnates the skin with promise, reading this book becomes the sensual and radiant experience of Alexandria itself: swarming, golden, and unchanging.
—Livres Hebdo
An adventure of the erotic and ironic, of immigrants and industry—and at the heart of it, the tale of an Egyptian city, Alexandria, at a time of decadence and disaster.
Antonis Haramis began his working life as a barefoot beggar in Athens, and became a ruthless tobacco magnate. Lebanese businessman Elias Khoury is a perfect polyglot, with ties to the British Secret Service. The French-born Yvette runs a bordello, dabbles in deceit, and employs a young Turkish dancer she can’t help falling in love with. They are all characters in Dimitris Stefanakis’ historical saga, Days of Alexandria. So is Daphne Haramis, Antonis’ wife, a kleptomaniac who traffics in antiquities, and Mahos, their son, a young homosexual who falls under the spell of a powerful orator in Berlin.
This sweeping and suspenseful novel spans the first sixty years of the last century, covers two world wars, and moves the reader with a sense of wanderlust from Alexandria to Constantinople to Paris, Athens, and finally Berlin. Yet, wherever the characters go, they retain a visceral connection to Alexandria and Egypt.
Stefanakis’ sultry novel tells the story of the soul of Alexandria itself, a Western city forged in the heart of the Orient, cosmopolitan and multicultural long before it was popular, poised at the forefront of internationalism. A page-turning epic about industry and politics, sex and commerce, that immerses the reader in the Haramis family drama and the circle of espionage, trafficking, and prostitution it takes to keep their empire running.
Author
Dimitris Stefanakis : Dimitris Stefanakis was born in Greece in 1961. He is well-known for his translations of such writers as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, and Prosper Mérimée. Days of Alexandria is his fourth novel.
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