NOVELS
WE ARE MADE OF EARTH 2019
At once timely and timeless, this powerful and absorbing novel by Panos Karnezis explores the price of peace and security through the intimate motivations and moral dilemmas of people bound together by fate and circumstance.
When an overcrowded dinghy capsizes at sea, a doctor is among those refugees thrown overboard. In the ensuing panic, he saves one life and condemns another. The doctor and the boy he has saved—the only surviving witness to the crime—eventually reach a tiny Greek island where they are offered shelter by the owner of a small travelling circus, itself marooned in the off-season. Debt-ridden, the circus owner knows that his most valuable asset is an Asian elephant, far from her natural habitat but lovingly tended by the owner’s wife even as she mourns their 10-year old daughter.
As the refugees await a long-deferred ferry to take them onto the next stage of their journey, the doctor is drawn to his host’s wife, all the while keeping his young companion, who loves him fervently, at arm’s length.
"Exploring sin, guilt and atonement, this dazzling study of displaced lives has the universalising succinctness, moral complexity and ironic force of the greatest novellas. Disaster looms in the seed of every phrase—and yet its tone is neutral, distanced, and the dark narrative is spellbinding."
(Stevie Davies, The Guardian)
"Panos Karnezis is possibly the leading Greek novelist of his generation, and one of Europe’s most distinguished storytellers… In We are Made of Earth he takes us, perhaps irresistibly, to the current refugee crisis [and] examines with both love and cruelty his characters’ attitudes to fate. He is both a sensitive and an honest observer. This is a fine addition to Karnezis’s already impressive list." (Richard Pine, Irish Times)
THE FUGITIVES 2015
In a remote corner of a Latin American rainforest, a badly wounded soldier encounters an English Catholic priest who takes him to the Indian village where Father Thomas has his church. The Indians, whose traditional way of life is under threat from squatters who settle in the forest they once had all to themselves, are wary of the new arrival. The army has been sent to evict the squatters, but they are defended by a group of guerrillas. Venustiano, the proud young Indian head of the village, is determined to protect his people, but sometimes feels powerless against the changes taking place around him. He despairs of his people’s craving for city life, and he mistrusts the squatters, the guerrillas, the army, Father Thomas and even Milagros, the archaeologist searching the area for the ruins of a lost ancient city without success. But his immediate problem is the bloodthirsty jaguar prowling around the village: he is the only Indian with a gun, and he means to use it.
"It is a gripping and worldly-wise performance from a novelist who is already well-respected but deserves to be better known." (Phil Baker Sunday Times)
"Snares the memory long after it has been consumed." (Caroline Jackson Tablet)
"Karnezis’ writing has intensity and directness, as he takes on the relationships between humans and their gods." (Kate Saunders The Times)
"The Fugitives is subtly brilliant." (Rosita Sweetman Irish Times)
THE CONVENT 2010
Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad...
The convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence; six women cut off from the world they've chosen to leave behind. Everything changes on the day that a suitcase punctured with air-holes is discovered on the convent steps. Soon Mother Superior Maria Ines finds that the box and its contents are to have consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.
"Unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling" (Times Literary Supplement)
"The Convent is at once a still, almost silent thing, and a blistering human drama...Karnezis's great skill is in evoking the haunting beauty of lost places and souls... There is a strength and confidence to Karnezis's prose" (The Times)
"Impressive... We witness justice and injustice, theological controversy, the politics of a tiny enclosed society, despair, cruelty, generosity, scandal, suspicion, and suicide, all told with immense verve and skill" (Sunday Times)
"An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller" (Independent)
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY 2007
It is the summer of 1975. As dawn breaks on a small private island off the Mediterranean coast, Marco Timoleon, an aging tycoon, wakes up to see the final preparations for his troubled daughter's twenty-fifth birthday party. Having found out that she is pregnant by a man he doesn't approve of, he secretly intends to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy: the family doctor stands by to perform the operation on the spot. But as the day unfolds, his plan is put to the test and comes to an unexpected conclusion.
"Both a serious meditation on masculinity and commercial power...and a rollicking beach-read...fans of Karnezis will not be disappointed. Marco is a huge and splendidly flawed hero for a five-star novel" (The Times)
"Such careful and subtle patterning confirms Karnezis as a novelist of unusual gifts" (Financial Times)
"Karnezis's wise fable gestures towards a dawning era, in which vacuous yet powerful celebrity finds its ultimate apotheosis" (Guardian)
"In prose as clear as the Mediterranean Sea...this is a richly detailed portrait of a man who could so easily have been sketched as a cartoon villain. It's a story about the power of stories themselves, and the countless ways we can all rewrite our pasts and twist our futures" (Daily Mail)
"The reader grows to love his detestable characters and this, along with the way he takes the mundane and cranks it up into madness, is the secret of Karnezis' appeal" (Independent on Sunday)
THE MAZE 2004
REVISED EDITION
Anatolia, 1922. Pursued by a Turkish army after three years of Greek occupation, a retreating Greek brigade has lost its way. Commanded by a brigadier with a passion for Greek mythology and a secret addiction to morphine, the brigade's only chance of salvation is to reach the Mediterranean coast and sail home. As the army wanders through the inhospitable land, morale crumbles among the troops, a spate of thefts goes unsolved and every man's thoughts retrurn to a terrible act of vengeance committed by the brigade. Their luck seems to change, when they come across a small town, up until then untouched by the war, where the mayor and schoolteacher are in competition for the favours of the local courtesan and a failed newspaper correspondent is drinking himself to death for lack of a story. But instead of outrunning its Furies, the brigade brings them to this seemingly idyllic palace, with fateful consequences for soldiers and citizens alike.
"The Maze confirms Karnezis as an original and important literary voice" (The Times)
"Worthy of Graham Greene. [The Maze is] an outlandish, ingeniously constructed novel as powerful and full of surprises as any ancient myth" (Sunday Telegraph)
"Enchanting... the mad beauty of Karnezis's imagination is entirely his own" (Guardian)
"Excellent... Assured and sophisticated" (Sunday Times)