Η Γυναίκα της Ζάκυθος
Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1859
A fierce, strange prose satire that turns Zakynthian society into a stage for hypocrisy, war, and moral judgment.
Books about society
Satire, marriage plots and engineered futures run through these books: societies shown from the inside, through the people who obey them, game them or get crushed by them. Take «Η Γυναίκα της Ζάκυθος», where Solomos turns Zakynthos into a stage for hypocrisy and moral judgment, or Emma, in which a clever, bored young woman arranges her neighbours' love lives and gets nearly everything wrong.
A page that shows it
A public warning turns conscience into a test.
Βάλτε το χέρι στη συνείδηση σας, εσύ Μ., εσύ Γ., εσύ Κ., εσύ Π., εσύ Τ. (γιατί σας τους άλλους δε σας γνωρίζω), και ιδέστε τι μπορεί νάβγει εάν μείνετε. Η διοίκηση σας γνωρίζει και βρίσκοντας σας εδώ θέλει πει πως την εφουρκίσετε εσείς”. -
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood, 1985
A woman survives in a theocratic state where her body is a resource; her wry, precise voice reports the daily cost of obedience.
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The Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown, 2003
A symbologist is pulled into a murder, a cipher hunt and a centuries-old secret hidden in plain sight across Paris and London.
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Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, 1932
An engineered future where comfort is compulsory and happiness is manufactured—and one outsider asks what was sacrificed to get it.
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Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, 1878
A society novel about a marriage coming apart and a landowner trying to build a meaningful life, full of dinner tables, fields, jealousy and philosophy.
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Emma
Jane Austen, 1815
A clever, rich, bored young woman decides to arrange her neighbours' love lives, and gets nearly everything wrong. Austen's funniest, most merciless book about self-knowledge.
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The Silent Patient
Alex Michaelides, 2019
A psychotherapist tries to make a silent murder suspect speak, and finds his own life caught in her refusal.
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Παραμύθι χωρίς όνομα
Πηνελόπη Δέλτα, 1910
A kingdoom rots under a vain king until his son and daughter set out to learn what diligence, honesty and a little knowledge can rebuild.
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Η Παντρειά της Σταλαχτής
Κωνσταντίνος Θεοτόκης, 1912
On the threshing floor and in the vineyards of old Corfu, a young woman's honour is staked against a rich man's promise, and the village watches.
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Trump
Donald Trump with Tony Schwartz, 1987
A brash New York developer narrates his deals in real time, mixing boardroom tactics, tabloid instinct and a salesman's case for thinking big.
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Η Ανθρωπόκαινος και το Αρνητικό Υψηλό
Γιώργος Κόκκινος, 2025
A historian of ideas asks how the climate crisis rewired our sense of time, place and responsibility — and why the warnings keep failing to move us.
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Othello
William Shakespeare, 1604
A general, a senator's daughter, and an ensign who knows exactly which words will undo them: Shakespeare's tightest study of how love is talked out of existence.
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The Rainmaker
John Grisham, 1995
A broke law student sues an insurance company for a family it refused to help, and finds out what a lawsuit really costs.
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A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
Three ghosts, one night, and the cheapest man in London forced to look at what his life has actually cost.
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Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
Jonathan Swift, 1726
A ship's surgeon keeps washing up among miniature courtiers, giants, absent-minded scientists and rational horses, and each country shows human folly from a new angle. It is still the sharpest satire in English.
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Dubliners
James Joyce, 1914
Fifteen short stories of ordinary Dubliners, from a boy's first crush to a party that ends in a quiet shock, written with a precision that makes small lives feel enormous.
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson, 2016
A potty-mouthed argument that the cure for anxiety isn't caring more but choosing better what to care about — and paying the price of that choice.
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Middlemarch
George Eliot, 1872
A provincial town, a clever woman married to the wrong scholar, an ambitious doctor, and the slow, comic, devastating work of learning that other people are real.
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The Stand
Stephen King, 1978
A flu escapes a lab and empties America; survivors choose between a saintly old woman and a smiling dark man. King's big, bleak, compulsive plague epic.
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Ο ζητιάνος
Ανδρέας Καρκαβίτσας, 1896
A begging mastermind and a priestess of superstition in a Thessalian village that will pay for a baby to stay away. Appalling, funny, exact.
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1884
A runaway boy and an enslaved man drift a raft down the Mississippi, and a child's plain talk quietly dismantles everything the adults around him believe.
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Life of Pi
Yann Martel, 2001
A boy survives 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger and comes back with a story about faith, fear and which version of events you choose to believe.
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Το γεγονός
Annie Ernaux, 2000
Annie Ernaux turns an intimate, life-altering experience into a clear-eyed account of memory, shame, and the limits imposed on women.
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The Institute
Stephen King, 2019
A boy with a gift is taken to a facility where children are studied, and asks what it will take to get out.
A taste of the feed
The endearing details that make a monster seem human.
He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
The Handmaid's Tale · Margaret Atwood
The mirror is honest even when your colleagues are kind.
Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon’s visibility had increased a hundred-fold after his involvement in a widely publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.
The Da Vinci Code · Dan Brown
What is lost when nothing is allowed to stand between wanting and having.
Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling, the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into a calm well-being. (The embryo is hungry; day in, day out, the blood-surrogate pump unceasingly turns its eight hundred revolutions a minute. The decanted infant howls; at once a nurse appears with a bottle of external secretion. Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers.
Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
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