The Figurine: Escape to Athens and breathe in the sea air in this captivating novel

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Helena’s desire to find answers about her heritage dovetails with a growing curiosity for archaeology, ignited by a summer spent with volunteers on a dig on an Aegean island. Their finds fuel her determination to protect the precious fragments recovered from the baked earth – and to understand the origins of her grandfather’s collection. Victoria’s first book for children, Maria’s Island (listed by Waterstones as one of the best children’s books of the year) was also published in 2020 – and is an adaptation of The Island for a younger audience . August 1957. The island of Spinalonga closes its leprosy colony. And a moment of violence has devastating consequences.

She is an ambassador for Lepra, a UK charity that raises money to treat the estimated three million leprosy sufferers worldwide, and is also an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust which promotes reading in the UK. Victoria is Patron of Knossos 2025 which is raising funds to renew the British School of Athens research centre in Crete. Themis is part of a family bitterly divided by politics and, as a young woman, her fury with those who have collaborated with the Nazis, drives her to fight for the communists. She is eventually imprisoned on the notorious islands of exile, Makronisos and Trikeri, and has to make a life or death decision. She is proud of having fought, but for the rest of her life is haunted by some of her actions. Forty years after the end of the civil war, she finally achieves catharsis. The Figurine will be published on 28th September 2023 and takes as its inspiration the dubious acquisition of cultural treasures and the price people – and countries – will pay to cling on to them.In 2020, came the sequel to The Island, One August Night, which was adapted for Greek state television in 2022. Those Who Are Loved has been germinating for a decade now, from the moment I first saw the island of Makronisos from the Greek mainland. I was told it was uninhabited, but had been a prison camp for communists. The discovery compelled me to read about the Greek civil war (in which many women played a role), but of course it also meant researching the events that led to that conflict as well as the long-term after-effects that are still seen in Greece even today. Everyone knows how much I love Greece, but exploring this story has taken me to some new and disquieting places.”– Victoria Hislop

In 2019, Victoria was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Sheffield, and in 2020 she was given Honorary Citizenship by the Greek President for her promotion of Greece. Jules, Rebecca, Rachel and Emma chat with Victoria Hislop about her latest book, The Figurine. We also talk about Greece, archaeology, Strictly Come Dancing and book recommendations ... Read the full articleOn a night in late October, with a howling gale outside, I sat down to read this book. Only when I closed it did I realise that the date on which the events took place exactly matched the date on which I was reading it. It was Halloween. The rest of the family was in the other room watching the television, but I decided to stay reading by our old metal stove that was useless for cooking, but good for “hugging” on cold nights. It seemed to me that this book was meant to be read on such a night: it was “The Perfect Book”. It was this sense of the relentless power of the elements that overwhelmed me as I finished reading, and the almost callous way in which the crew were treated by the sea: “They didn’t die, they disappeared off the face of the earth.” The men may have vanished, but this book means that they will never be forgotten – and the memory of those hours when I read it remains a very sharp one. As well as studying the Greek language (it is her ultimate ambition to read everything and anything without the presence of a dictionary by her side), she spends her spare time reading, swimming, playing tennis and, these days, dancing (having been a contestant in Greece’s version of “Strictly” in 2021). Those Who Are Loved, published in 2019, tells the story of Greece’s traumatic period of occupation and civil war during the 20 th century. Her affection for the Mediterranean then took her to Spain, and in The Return she wrote about the painful secrets of its civil war.

Hislop’s love for Greece shines and transports readers through space and time to a brilliantly drawn world” In the aftermath, the question of how to resume life looms large. Stigma and scandal need to be confronted and somehow, for those impacted, a future built from the ruins of the past.

If perfection exists in the form it comes from Alice Munro who proves herself worthy of her recent Nobel Prize. In “Miles City, Montana” and “Gravel”, Munro reveals the devastation caused by “all our natural, and particular, mistakes”. A delightful and original new book from multimillion-copy bestselling author Victoria Hislop, author of The Island and The Sunrise Victoria Hislop sheds light on the complexity of Greece’s traumatic past and weaves it into the dynamic tale of a woman who is both hero and villain, and her lifelong fight for justice.