Here are 100 books that Island Prize fans have personally recommended if you like
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All the books on my list are exciting readings and tales of daring do. I loved these books because of the intimate personal details and accounts they give of war. They give a great impression of the challenges the men face and the dangers flung up by fighting and close combat. They also tell of the comradeship between men in war.
This book relates the recollections of the men of the Levant Schooner Flotilla, The Sacred Company, and the Aegean Raiding Forces. The author was a young officer in the Royal Naval Reserve who commanded a flotilla of raiding caiques on undercover operations in the Greek Islands.
These men were involved in naval operations in WWII. A mixed bag of volunteers, their task was to carry out Allied raiding parties in enemy-held territory. In total secrecy, under the cover of darkness, they navigated the seas, scuttled enemy boats, and blew up enemy ammunition.
This is an anthology of true stories about a little-known episode in the Mediterranean during World War II. The author formed and commanded a flotilla of caiques on undercover operations in the Greek islands whose task was to smuggle Allied raiding parties and their supplies in and out of enemy held territory, in total secrecy and under cover of darkness - risky undertakings that required high levels of navigational and seamanship skills from the skippers. This clandestine war is recounted by the author, 12 skippers of caiques, one of a motor launch and an RAF officer, who were actually involved…
All the books on my list are exciting readings and tales of daring do. I loved these books because of the intimate personal details and accounts they give of war. They give a great impression of the challenges the men face and the dangers flung up by fighting and close combat. They also tell of the comradeship between men in war.
Most of the action is set in the Aegean, where the author served with the Special Boat Service, an off-shoot of the Special Air Service. Their aim was to raid airfields on the German-held islands.
He tells not only of the daring adventures but his admiration of the Greek resistance fighters who risked not only their own loves, but that of whole villages, to offer their support to the British.
Over fifty years having now passed since the Second World War ended, it is surprising that there are any first-hand accounts left that are worth the telling. The fact that there are, and that they have remained untold, can only be ascribed to modesty and to the fact that fifty years ago what seems to be the post-war generation to be the exclusive province of thriller writers was to David Sutherland's generation the only adult world they had ever known. It needs someone to say: "You'd better write it down before it's too late" or a grandchild to ask: "What…
All the books on my list are exciting readings and tales of daring do. I loved these books because of the intimate personal details and accounts they give of war. They give a great impression of the challenges the men face and the dangers flung up by fighting and close combat. They also tell of the comradeship between men in war.
This is the story of the men from the New Zealand R Patrol, Long Range Desert Group. Their stories are told mostly in the words of the participants themselves through wartime operational reports, diaries, personal letters, and post-war interviews.
Owen was an officer in the LRDG and recollects various escapades he was involved in during operations. Lloyd Owen took command of the LRDG after being involved in the Battle of Leros.
Established to operate deep behind enemy lines in North Africa, the Long Range Desert Group was the first of the special forces to make a significant contribution. This is a definitive history of this elite organisation, by a former commander of the unit.'
All the books on my list are exciting readings and tales of daring do. I loved these books because of the intimate personal details and accounts they give of war. They give a great impression of the challenges the men face and the dangers flung up by fighting and close combat. They also tell of the comradeship between men in war.
These are recollections of a Parish as a serving officer with Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. He was involved in fighting in Greece, starting with the Battle of Crete in 1941 and culminating in the capture of Leros in November 1943.
He addresses the failures of the events and why these happened.
I wrote my first thriller at age 8 about a girl who ran away and joined the circus. For later works, I, a pediatric physician, did opt to follow my English teachers’ guidance to write about what you know, including science, medicine, psychology, journalism, and my twin home countries of America and Greece. As YS Pascal, I wrote the Zygan Emprise Trilogy, which blended ancient Greek history, mythology, and literature. As Linda Reid, I co-authored the award-winning Sammy Greene thriller series with Dr. Deborah Shlian and was eager to fly investigative reporter Sammy and her ex-cop friend Gus Pappajohn to the shores of modern Athens to solve an ancient and modern mystery.
Katherine, a Greek immigrant to the US, took her American children to Greece in the late 1930s to live on her family’s farm and escape from the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the arrival of the Nazi invaders trapped the family in Greece during the Occupation and the end of World War II. Based on a true family story, American Kid movingly describes the experiences of the children in the remote mountain village of Katherine’s birth, and their efforts to survive the occupation of their home by Nazis. Would they ever see their beloved America again? An authentic glimpse of the devastating war’s impact on innocent youth and the value of hope.
For Katherine and her three American children, Greece was meant to be a one-year refuge from the late 1930’s Depression. Her husband’s family-owned orchard should have provided for their well-being, but instead embroiled them in legal debate. WWII Axis bombings of Kalamata prompted the young family to flee to the remote mountain village of Katherine’s birth, but Nazi invasion—and seemingly endless occupation of their village and their house—trapped them there until the war's end. Told through the eyes of John, Katherine’s youngest child, he shares a universal story of fear and frustration faced by all innocent civilians during war in…
My passion for the Battle of Crete flows from my traveler’s experiences of this most beautiful of Mediterranean islands and its people. The Second World War is just one episode in a history that stretches back millennia, yet to this day, it remains ever-present in the minds of Cretans. The landscape, too, still bears the scars of war. Every visitor to Crete has the opportunity to uncover the multiple layers of a rich past. To dig down to the horrors of the twentieth century with its brutal war and occupation does not take long, and it is enormously rewarding. In few places are past and present so closely intertwined.
For me, the standout history of the Battle of Crete to this day remains this book, first published back in 1966. Stewart was able to bring his own experience of the war to bear–he had served as a medical officer with a British unit and witnessed with his own eyes the spectacular airborne German invasion.
This is not, however, a first-hand battle account but rather the beautifully crafted result of six years of research drawing on voluminous first-hand accounts, archival sources, and histories. I am drawn to the compelling descriptions of battle while also appreciating the skill with which the author places the Battle of Crete in its wider political and strategic context.
Providing an account of the struggle for Crete during World War II, this book contains some of the author's own experiences as a Medical Officer at the time of the battle. The author describes the leadership, the geography, the communications problems and the delayed counter-attack. In the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of Russia, Hitler's Air Division landed on Crete to secure the Nazis' southern flank. There they encountered a chance collection of New Zealanders, Australians, and British, survivors of the retreat from Greece. Stewart argues that the battle that followed among the island's olive groves, terraced hillsides,…
My passion for the Battle of Crete flows from my traveler’s experiences of this most beautiful of Mediterranean islands and its people. The Second World War is just one episode in a history that stretches back millennia, yet to this day, it remains ever-present in the minds of Cretans. The landscape, too, still bears the scars of war. Every visitor to Crete has the opportunity to uncover the multiple layers of a rich past. To dig down to the horrors of the twentieth century with its brutal war and occupation does not take long, and it is enormously rewarding. In few places are past and present so closely intertwined.
I know the value of visiting the sites of battle, even decades or centuries after the event. A sense of topography and space acquired in situ can provide insights in ways that pages, maps, and screens cannot. Yannis Prekatsounakis is a native of Heraklion. His book is infused with his own intimate sense of the place where a crucial part of the Battle of Crete raged.
Prekatsounakis, for good reason, laments that the works of many historians on the Battle of Crete lack Greek perspectives. While he delivers them in abundance here, he weaves them with narratives and accounts of German and Allied participants as well. I love the abundance of maps and photographs that complement the author’s own heightened sense of place.
Crete, 20 May 1941: the first campaign-sized airborne assault is launched. Many books have been written about this famous invasion, with the emphasis mainly on the battles for Maleme and Chania. The Battle for Heraklion - an epic struggle - remained largely forgotten and widely unstudied. Yet the desperate fight for Heraklion had everything: street-fighting in the town; heroic attacks against well-fortified positions and medieval walls; heavy losses on all sides; and tragic stories involving famous German aristocratic families like the von Blüchers and members of the Bismarck family. This book highlights personal stories and accounts - and the author’s…
Growing up, I loved studying history, and reading historical, family sagas, and crime novels. Even though I have four degrees—three engineering and one accounting—I love to write. My goal is that my readers who don’t like history, learn it through my novels. What I like about writing is you learn not just about history not taught in school, but also other topics, including meeting and learning from very interesting people. Therefore, it is an interesting hobby to have. I am currently writing my third novel set in the 1960s, and written several articles and short stories. I have also written screenplays for two of my short stories.
Lovers of World War 2 and the interwar years will like this book. It partly goes into life during Nazi-occupied France during WW2 and its aftermath. Although this book is about one woman’s revenge against her former lover, it gives the reader an idea of what life was like during the occupation. It helped me understand the problems people go through and who their real friends are when faced with adversity. Even though people may do wicked things to others or to those who have harmed them, their conscience gets the better of them when it comes to helping those who have shown them kindness. Their good side is revealed; so therefore, it is always good to find the saving grace rather than just the bad qualities in people.
The Other Side of Midnight is Sidney Sheldon at his best. This page-turner is full of tortured romantic entanglements, reverses of fortune, thrilling suspense, and ultimate justice. In Paris, Washington, and a fabulous villa in Greece, an innocent American becomes a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a game of vengeance and betrayal. She is Catherine Douglas, a woman caught in a web of four lives intertwined by passion as her handsome husband pursues an incredibly beautiful film star . . . and as Constantin Demeris, a legendary Greek tycoon, tightens the strands that control them all.
I’m a food and travel journalist, raised by a Greek father and a British mother. I’ve always been obsessed with the fostering of my Greek culture, heritage, and identity and have been particularly interested in the duality of my two identities, since moving to England from Greece as a young girl. During my teenage years in grey and drizzly England, the food we ate as a family transported me to my grandmothers’ white-washed alleyway, dotted with geraniums and bursting with the colours and flavours of Greece. Since then I’ve become obsessed with what food and time-perfected recipes can tell us about our heritage.
The Colossus of Maroussi is a book all wanderers and visitors of Greece should dip into at least once.
It’s a travelogue that drips with humour from the brilliant Henry Miller. It is a collection of fantastic prose inspired by the islands and mainland that Miller visited in the early 20th Century. It offers great wit and wisdom as well as cultural insights that still feel incredibly relevant to Greece today, despite the book being published in the 1940s.
When I think of great travel literature, this book is a classic. It speaks on the Greek people - their strength, stoicism, and humour - and chronicles a time in Greece before mass tourism descended and changed the islands forever.
Like the ancient colossus that stood over the harbor of Rhodes, Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi stands as a seminal classic in travel literature. It has preceded the footsteps of prominent travel writers such as Pico Iyer and Rolf Potts. The book Miller would later cite as his favorite began with a young woman's seductive description of Greece. Miller headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside: a flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach; the Greek poet Katsmbalis, the "colossus" of Miller's book, stirs every rooster within…
My expertise comes through my work and degrees as an undergraduate, Master’s, and Phd student, in history and comparative historical sociology. It is demonstrated mainly in my two books, one on the Spanish, Yugoslav, and Greek Civil Wars, the other on Anti-Leftist Politics, listed above. It also comes through my teaching, which includes the entire world history sequence, in addition to numerous specialized courses and seminars. My passion could be described as a love for the world and its peoples, and a loathing for systems and politics of inequality and injustice.
The Kapetanios put me on a course that I have expanded upon since 1980.
It’s a close-up and dramatic account of the civil war that took place in Greece, beginning in the period of the Axis occupation, but continuing off and on in the post-WWII period to 1949. In 1980, I had wanted to travel to Greece but could not. The best I could do was find a good book on its modern history.
I found The Kapetanios at People’s Books (now sadly defunct) in Milwaukee, WI. There are reasons to question its historical accuracy – normal for any history – but the book and its subject matter grabbed me and never let me go. I’d still recommend the book to anyone interested in that tragic, important, and avoidable conflict.
The Greek Civil War was one of the bloodiest of modern times: it cost the lives of more than 600,000 people out of a population of 7 million. It was one of the founding moments of the Cold War and a pilot experience, in Europe itself, of the Western imperialist intervention practised in South-East Asia and elsewhere today. This book is the first blow-by-blow account of the process of the Greek Revolution and its background in the Resistance against Nazi occupation and fascist collaboration in the Second World War. The 'kapetanios' were the guerilla chiefs in the mountains in Greece…
