What price honour? & The Convict - Konstantinos Theotokis

This is the first English translations of What price honour? and The Convict - translated by J. M. Q. Davies.

To read the two novellas in this volume is, not just to be taken to a historical and literary past worth knowing in its own right, but to be put in contact with a powerful vein of writing which continues to ramify more than a century on.

Konstantinos Theotokis, a Corfiot aristocrat turned socialist, writing on the threshold of the modern era as the Ionian Islands emerged from centuries of Venetian and British rule, portrays the harsh lives of the local peasantry and the decline of the Italianized overlords in fiction of great power, humour and compassion.

What price honour? - set in Corfu Town's working suburb of Mandouki - is a gripping proto-feminist story of romantic love destroyed by class conflict and the corrosive power of money.

The Convict - centres on a violent crime of passion for which a peasant innocent or holy fool is wrongfully convicted. All the moral and existential questions we still live with is a post-Nietzschean world where 'God is dead' are raised in this humourous but challenging work.