About the Book
Homelessness is the condition in which many people live now. But how will the refugees, from all global conflicts, shape their lives and actions? 1922. Alone of his family, a young Greek boy flees the Turkish massacre in Smyrna. Arriving in Greece with thousands of others, Gregoris Gregoriou works with the desperate drive of the uprooted. He is the son of textile merchants, and with his genius for fabrics he may make and lose fortunes. But also he is caught in a lifelong escape, and a lifelong search for what he has lost -- which perhaps he finds in the enticing fabrics from his Ionian land. New wars approach, and Gregoris and his family endure the traumas of the German invasion and the Greek Civil War with inventiveness, tenacity -- and fear. His young daughter Eleni registers the obscenity of foreign invasion, the intimate atrocity of civil strife. She finds refuge in the closeness of Greek family life, with its almost incestuous intensity and conflict, and its moments of rare, precarious pleasure. She can hide in the intimacy of her father's shop, in the enchantments of the cloths he trades with such artfulness.
She becomes entangled in her father's story, and will share his uprootedness and lasting nostalgia. But will her secret alliance with her father drive her, like him, to flee -- from family divisions and ties and enticements? Familiar Wars grants a disturbing, exhilarating look at the way war and exile invade the psyche of a family, and may shape a young imagination. The novelist Stanley Middleton has written, 'Familiar Wars is magnificently readable. The refugee Gregoris Gregoriou and his family are brilliantly portrayed, in time of war, in commercial success and disaster, in domestic and public dissension. The sketching of a huge cast of characters through action makes this book both powerful and memorable. By the end we are all Gregoris, Anastasia, Eleni; we have become Greeks caught up in a rich convincing saga. This is, in every sense, a big book.'
Table of Contents:
Part I Part II
About the Author :
Julietta Harvey was born and educated in Thessaloniki, Greece. She came to England on a British Council Scholarship and took her PhD at Cambridge, where she was elected to a Fellowship at Clare Hall. She has published on Seventeenth Century English literature and on Greek contemporary fiction. She is an Associate of Clare Hall, and is married to novelist and critic John Harvey. Her first novel, Familiar Wars, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the Angel Literary Award, and the PEN Macmillan Prize. Familiar Wars is a story of refugees, Greeks expelled from Asia Minor arriving in northern Greece in 1922. It tells, over two generations, a history of displacement and energetic survival. Familiar Wars was published in Norwegian translation by Fredhois and is currently being translated into Greek.
Review :
'Fresh, delightful and arresting. The sweep and momentum of history are maintained throughout like a rainbow arc through the murky sky of war and disruption... Scenes like a marriage being arranged between the broker and the parents, a community picnic, a card game or promenade are all sketched with a lively eye for detail and the descriptive prose is beautifully accomplished... Apart from this twinkling, appreciative wit, and the heavy, honeyed nostalgia, there is another element that one recognises from the older literature of that world -- a clear-eyed, unsentimental view of human failings, human fashion... The characters of Gregoris the merchant, his difficult and discontented wife Anastasia, and their three daughters, are full, satisfying portraits done in oils -- the mother with a love so deep and instinctive that it can scarcely be expressed, the father with an affection that is flirtatious, playful, almost incestuous ... Julietta Harvey's first novel combines dry wit with passion, and a sense of history with a wonderfully sensuous awareness of the immediate.' Anita Desai, Spectator 'Familiar Wars is a celebration of Greek endurance in the person of Gregoris Gregoriou and his daughter Eleni ... The panoramic story of Gregoriou's transformation from juvenile Smyrna merchant to Saloniki department tycoon makes a finely domesticated epic ... But this Greek-born novelist's gifts are far more bearable than that. She knows her stuff. And especially Gregoriou's stuff. For this novel is not only as good as account of Greek spirituality as you'll find anywhere, alive with the Orthodox pious alertness to the blessed mysteries of birth and death, it's also, and paradoxically, an extraordinarily arresting paean to commodity fetishism, a texture of textiles, a joyous litany of the woven things, all the varieties of stuffs, carpets that Gregoriou survives by dealing in. The novel grants a magnificent sense, at once saddening and cheering, of what's become of Homer's people -- Eleni of Troy, Mr Menelaus, sister Calliope, and the rest -- in our time, but it's even more magnificent as a sustained ode, a long poem to the mercantile spirit and the things that human beings lovingly craft and greedily trade.' Valentine Cunningham, Observer 'Familiar Wars is at once intimate and epic: it captures the joys and miseries of daily life and gives a true and momentous evocation of the huge reversals Greece has known in the early twentieth century ... not in a doctrinaire spirit, but with a sympathy that transcends any doctrine ... Absolutely original, the first novel of Julietta Harvey is one of the best of the year and should be a favourite for the Booker Prize. The power of invention, of imagination, of creative force, make one hope her readers will be legion.' Ariel Daigre, BBC World Service 'Ambitious and worthwhile ... a wide-ranging sweep around the Mediterranean, tracing the story of the Greeks' displacement from Turkey around the time of the 1922 massacres ... a vast and colourful spectacle ... conjuring the swirling noise of the bazaars, the passing sounds of musicians and of voices raised in passion ... it is Gregoris's final act of prudence and emotional betrayal -- selling his home to save his shop -- which becomes the novel's most memorable closing scene.' William Henry Holmes, Sunday Telegraph 'About what happened with the Greeks and Turks in the years between the first World War and 1922 ... there are two books which should be on your immediate reading list. One is a novel 'Familiar Wars' by Julietta Harvey.' 'Illegal views expressed', Melbourne Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog 'Both background and the characters are vividly drawn ... a most readable book.' Catholic Herald 'At the end of the book, the writer not only breaks away from the family environment, setting out on her own journey, but is aware that within her an artist is formed, a silkworm of creative imagination that will weave the silk...of her father's story, the story of her city, the story of her homeland.' Aliki Bacopoulou-Halls, Thessalonikeon Polis 'In this ability to weave together the general socio-economic climate with Gregoris's private struggles Harvey shows her strength as a novelist ... she can vividly recreate the fear, claustrophobia and panic of the Turkish destruction of Smyrna ... Familiar Wars will appeal to anyone with an interest in Greek history and mythology.' Cyprus Life
