‘Back to Delphi’, by Ioanna Karystiani

If you mixed Lionel Shriver’s chilling We Need to Talk About Kevin with a Joycean stream of consciousness from a female Ulysses in contemporary Athens, you’d be approaching the spirit of Ioanna Karystiani’s Back to Delphi. Viv is the mother of a notorious rapist and murderer, now locked up in Korydallos prison. Granted five days to take him on leave of absence, she decides that a trip to Delphi might provide salvation for her damaged son and for a relationship based on silence and betrayal. Strange, disturbing and funny, the book reveals the seedy neighbourhoods and bedsits of 21st-century Athens, its hot, dirty parks and ‘the drone of Balkan, Asian and African languages rising shrill above every badly designed square’. Not what the Greek tourist board is going to recommend, but all the more intriguing for it.

Ioanna Karystiani is a much admired writer who won the Greek National Book Award (for her novel, The Jasmine Isle) and whose screenplay, Brides, was made into a successful film, directed by her husband, Pantelis Voulagaris, with Martin Scorsese as executive producer.