Slaves in their Chains - Konstantinos Theotokis

Konstantinos Theotokis, a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing on the threshold of the modern era as Corfu emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, chronicled the decline of the local Italianized nobility and the loves and honour killings of their peasants with matchless power and compassion. His masterpiece Slaves in their Chains (1922) is the tragicomic saga of a noble family's descent into poverty, dishonour, suicide and madness on the eve of Greece's entry into the Great War. The ambiguities of Theotokis's own complex personality and the classical structure and symbolic leitmotifs of his remarkable novel, here in English for the first time, are absorbingly explored in the translator's introduction.

Old Count Ophiomachos in the clutches of a wily money-lender, his daughter blackmailed into abandoning her idealistic but chronically ailing lover for a crude wealthy doctor, and her idle brother in thrall to a vindictive mistress all come dramatically to life in scenes of great intensity and passion. And from the deftly caricatured supporting cast of bankers, poetasters, impoverished aristocrats, loose wives, young radicals and nepotistic politicians, a satirical picture of decadent, fin-de-siecle Corfu emerges for which Theotokis was never quite forgiven by his fellow islanders.