Christine has been working on a collaboration with British author, Peter Barber, to get the word out about his new book, A Parthenon in Pefki, set in Greece.  It's a romcom of extraordinary candour, anecdotal humor, and endearing warmth.  You'll love it!



Peter and his Greek wife, Alex, launched this book at a restaurant in Pefki, the small Greek island where the book is set.  He wrote a guest post on our blog about the launch party, which follows the same entertaining and endearing narrative that you'll find in Peter's books.  You can read the post here:

A Parthenon in Pefki is the sequel to A Parthenon on Our Roof, which we read last February in our online book club, Travel Europe Through Books. We have to admit that we like the Pefki book the most.

We've been highlighting Val's own romcom, Fate and Longing in Lisbon, and have made it available to our UK readers for just £0.99 until February 10th, just in time for Valentine's Day:

In January we Traveled Europe Through Books by way of the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov's International Booker Prize winning book, Time Shelter.  It's a very unique book, with an imaginative structure that alternates between the voice of the author and his imaginary friend, Gaustin.  Gaustin is a clinician tasked with caring for Europeans with Alzheimer's disease.  He takes an unusual approach: he recreates the past that his patients recognize and love, shielding them from the frightening and mysterious present to which they cannot relate.  



The book is quite humorous and has much to say about Europe over the past 100 years, as well as the Bulgarian perspective on life, memory, and Europe as a whole.

Photo by Valeri Terziyski



As companion to this book, we published a blogpost on Bulgarian literature, indicating Time Shelter's place in it.  Bulgaria has had a profound effect on world literature, particularly that which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet (Russian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, etc.), and also includes a lot of great poetry and contemporary novels, so it's worth a read: