By Panos Liakos

Classicist, Translator, Film Historian

Continuing the publication of her collected works, ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΨΥΧΟΓΙΟΣ – PSICHOGIOS PUBLICATIONS showcase a series of works that the widely read British author Agatha Christie wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

If Jorge Luis Borges had expressed his admiration for the steely logic behind her detective novels, then as a lover of sentimental (and never of merely sentimental-seeming) novels, he would have appreciated the development of the plot and characters in Giant’s Bread, (1930), in an excellent translation by Argyro Mantoglou for the present Greek edition.

In a work structured around the concept of “books,” we follow the story of a group of friends from their childhood years at the Abbey through the tumultuous events following the end of World War I. Although the influence of psychoanalysis makes certain passages seem overly explanatory to the modern reader, nevertheless, the recreation of the upper-middle-class atmosphere and the author’s experiences from World War I ensure that you won’t be able to put Giant’s Bread down for a single moment.