Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Vin Summer) - Softcover

"A wonderful epic novel" The Times "Louis de Bernieres is the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh... His novel will give pleasure to all sorts of readers" Evening Standard "An emotional, funny, stunning novel which swings with wide smoothness between joy and bleakness, personal lives and history... It's lyrical and angry, satirical and earnest" Observer "A master of haunted realism. His best novel yet. He deals with death and love and tragedy... This is a novel to be prized" Daily Mail "Captain Corelli's Mandolin is a wonderful, hypnotic novel of fabulous scope and tremendous, iridescent charm - and you can quote me" "Brims with all the grand topics of literature - love and death, heroism and skull-duggery, humor and pathos, not to mention art and religion... A good old-fashioned novel" Washington Post Book World "An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent" Los Angeles Times Book Review "Stunning...a high-spirited historical romance... Remarkable" New York Times Book Review "A true diamond of a novel, glinting with comedy and tragedy" Daily Mail

'Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides'. It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. At first he is ostracised by the locals, but as a conscientious but far from fanatical soldier, whose main aim is to have a peaceful war, he proves in time to be civilised, humorous - and a consummate musician. When the local doctor's daughter's letters to her fiance - a member of the underground - go unanswered, the working of the eternal triangle seems inevitable. But can this fragile love survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?