Audio

juliet stevenson reads

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Juliet Stevenson reads “Those who are Loved”

You can now listen to exclusive extracts from the audiobook of Those Who are Loved, read by Juliet Stevenson, courtesy of  Headline books.

You can listen to the whole excerpt by clicking the link below

Or listen to individual chapters by clicking on the links below

The complete audiobook is available to purchase from Audible, and from iTunes.

Synopsis

Those Who Are Loved, Victoria’s gripping new Sunday Times Number One bestseller, is set against the backdrop of the German occupation of Greece, the subsequent civil war and a military dictatorship, all of which left deep scars.

Athens 1941. After decades of political uncertainty, Greece is polarised between Right- and Left-wing views when the Germans invade.

Fifteen-year-old Themis comes from a family divided by these political differences. The Nazi occupation deepens the fault-lines between those she loves just as it reduces Greece to destitution. She watches friends die in the ensuing famine and is moved to commit acts of resistance.

In the civil war that follows the end of the occupation, Themis joins the Communist army, where she experiences the extremes of love and hatred and the paradoxes presented by a war in which Greek fights Greek.

Eventually imprisoned on the infamous islands of exile, Makronisos and then Trikeri, Themis encounters another prisoner whose life will entwine with her own in ways neither can foresee. And finds she must weigh her principles against her desire to escape and live.

As she looks back on her life, Themis realises how tightly the personal and political can become entangled. While some wounds heal, others deepen.

 

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Victoria on BBC’s A Good Read

A_Good_ReadVictoria Hislop and One Show presenter Alex Jones talk with Harriett Gilbert about their favourite books. Alex Jones has chosen The Girls by Lisa Jewell, while Harriett’s pick is Days of Abandonment by the writer everyone’s talking about, who goes by the pseudonym Elena Ferrante. And what do three women who aren’t keen on Virginia Woolf make of Victoria’s choice, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours?

To listen on BBC iPlayer, click here.

bookclub

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Victoria on “Book Club” with James Naughtie.

Victoria Hislop talks to James Naughtie and readers about her debut novel The Island, a fictional account of a real life leprosy colony, the island of Spinalonga, just off the coast of Crete. First published in 2005, The Island has now sold over a million copies.

To listen to the programme on BBC iPlayer, click here

Victoria says that when she first went to Spinalonga, as a curious tourist, she had no idea that leprosy still even existed in the 20th century. She thought it had been wiped out hundreds of years ago. Even today, around 500 new cases are diagnosed every year in India and South America.

Before writing novels Victoria was a successful travel journalist. On that first visit, her initial idea had been to write a piece for one of the Sunday newspapers, but after fifteen minutes wandering around the abandoned village on the island, she decided to tell the story in fiction instead.

The resulting novel tells the story of a family beset by two cases of leprosy in the 1930s and 50s, before the cure was found. In the 1930s, Eleni, a school teacher in the village opposite the leprosy colony, catches the disease, probably from a pupil. As the pair are exiled to Spinalonga, we see how her husband and two daughters cope in her absence, one of whom will also succumb to the disease some fifteen years later.

Victoria explores the shame and stigma of the disease through these characters and their lives and love affairs in a family saga stretching to present day London.

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