Three Summers

Praise

“A leisurely, largehearted coming-of-age novel, earthy and innocent, nostalgic and beautifully rendered.” —Kirkus

“Liberaki . . . certainly wrote unlike others of her generation. . . . [Three Summers] pushed the bounds of the possible: juggling narrative voices and modes, upending expectations for a conventional narrative arc, folding scenes of teenage sex into a book published in 1946.” —Karen Emmerich, Public Books

“Sweet, light, and a dreamy escape . . . The book is so transporting to early adolescence, but with fresher strawberries than you ever got to eat!” —Lit Hub

“Over and above . . . innovation in the form of the Greek novel, Liberaki also made what we might consider a feminist political contribution to Greek letters. Following Woolf, she captures life as it is lived in small ‘moments of being,’ especially of female domestic rituals . . . translating these private moments into the public language that had effectively been forbidden to Greek women.” —Niko Maragos, Electric Literature

“Makes for an appealing and quite rich novel of young women’s lives—with interesting secondary characters and stories, too—with some creative twists and touches by Liberaki in how she presents and unfolds her tale. . . . the writing is strong and often arresting. A nice piece of work.” —The Complete Review

“In this unforgettable novel, lush and evocative passages are interspersed with candid, astringent, and often unsettling insights about adolescence, desire, and the mysterious web of human relationships. Margarita Liberaki’s sensuousness has an edge, and her tartness has a compelling sweetness. Enthralled, the reader moves deeper and deeper into her summery world.” —Rachel Hadas

“This cinematic, sun-drenched novel about innocence and experience depicts a vanished era of bourgeois pleasures against the gardens and olive groves of one of Athens’s oldest suburbs. The mores of Athenian society are in tension with the drives and abundance of the Greek landscape itself: even the orderly pistachio orchards, with their male and female trees yearning for communion, vibrate with sex, heat, color, flavor, and scent. Karen Van Dyck’s translation vividly reenacts Liberaki’s color-saturated prose.” —A.E. Stallings