iris literary agency

HAIKU ON THE FOUR SEASONS

A tender story about three sisters coming of age in Greece over the course of three summers, now available after being out of print for over twenty years. 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.

Α Greek classic, praised by Albert Camus when first published in French in 1950.

These powerful and poignant monologues, narrate the rising of fascism in a society that lives a crisis she can’t bear. Different inhabitants of the same area in the center of Athens are the persons who talk. It’s not only without money that these people are left, a lack of education is obvious. But who can tell who will finally lead the angry and desperate people?

What place can the recurrent crime have in the reality of a long-lasting war, be it a war of liberation or a civil one, a social war or an individual struggle for survival? What is the point of civilians being sacrificed, when these are merely unsuspecting victims of vengeance?