The Convent

A major new novel from one of our finest young writers, author of Little Infamies and The Maze.

Unexpectedly haunting, its details catching like splinters in that part of the imagination that responds to pure storytelling

The Convent is at once a still, almost silent thing, and a blistering human drama...Karnezis's great skill is in evoking the haunting beauty of lost places and souls... There is a strength and confidence to Karnezis's prose

Impressive... We witness justice and injustice, theological controversy, the politics of a tiny enclosed society, despair, cruelty, generosity, scandal, suspicion, and suicide, all told with immense verve and skill

An impressive addition to the works of a master storyteller

This fragrant, fond and faintly otherworldly novel, with its final, poignant twist, is a memorable read

Panos Karnezis writes with assurance of a world which must, perforce, be closed to him

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Little Infamies, a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and two previous novels; The Maze, shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award and The Birthday Party. Panos Karnezis lives in London.

Those whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad... 
 
The convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence; six women cut off from the world they've chosen to leave behind. 
 
Everything changes on the day that a suitcase punctured with air-holes is discovered on the convent steps. Soon Mother Superior Maria Ines finds that the box and its contents are to have consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.

The Birthday Party

A brilliant modern fairy tale by the highly praised author of Little Infamies and The Maze.

Both a serious meditation on masculinity and commercial power...and a rollicking beach-read...fans of Karnezis will not be disappointed. Marco is a huge and splendidly flawed hero for a five-star novel

Such careful and subtle patterning confirms Karnezis as a novelist of unusual gifts

Karnezis's wise fable gestures towards a dawning era, in which vacuous yet powerful celebrity finds its ultimate apotheosis

In prose as clear as the Mediterranean Sea...this is a richly detailed portrait of a man who could so easily have been sketched as a cartoon villain. It's a story about the power of stories themselves, and the countless ways we can all rewrite our pasts and twist our futures

The reader grows to love his detestable characters and this, along with the way he takes the mundane and cranks it up into madness, is the secret of Karnezis' appeal

As clever plotting and dramatic irony build a page-turning momentum, Timoleon engages sympathy even in the midst of his follies

The reader is invited to strap themselves in and enjoy the ride. And what a scenic ride it is

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. His first book, Little Infamies (2002) is a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and his second book, The Maze (2004) is a novel set in Anatolia in 1922. It was shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award. Panos Karnezis lives in London.

It is the summer of 1975. As dawn breaks on a small private island off the Mediterranean coast, Marco Timoleon, an aging tycoon, wakes up to see the final preparations for his troubled daughter's twenty-fifth birthday party. Having found out that she is pregnant by a man he doesn't approve of, he secretly intends to persuade her to terminate the pregnancy: the family doctor stands by to perform the operation on the spot. But as the day unfolds, his plan is put to the test and comes to an unexpected conclusion.

The Maze

The revised version of Panos Karnezis's Whitbread-Nominated first novel.

Karnezis seems likely to take his place beside the masters of European storytelling

The Maze confirms Karnezis as an original and important literary voice

Worthy of Graham Greene. [The Maze is] an outlandish, ingeniously constructed novel as powerful and full of surprises as any ancient myth

Enchanting... the mad beauty of Karnezis's imagination is entirely his own

Panos Karnezis was born in Greece in 1967 and came to England in 1992. He studied engineering at Oxford and worked in industry before starting to write in English. He studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Little Infamies, a collection of connected short stories set in a nameless Greek village, and the novels; The Maze, shortlisted for the 2004 Whitbread First Novel Award, The Birthday Party and The Convent. Panos Karnezis lives in London.

Anatolia, 1922. Pursued by a Turkish army after three years of Greek occupation, a retreating Greek brigade has lost its way. Commanded by a brigadier with a passion for Greek mythology and a secret addiction to morphine, the brigade's only chance of salvation is to reach the Mediterranean coast and sail home. As the army wanders through the inhospitable land, morale crumbles among the troops, a spate of thefts goes unsolved and every man's thoughts retrurn to a terrible act of vengeance committed by the brigade. 
 
Their luck seems to change, when they come across a small town, up until then untouched by the war, where the mayor and schoolteacher are in competition for the favours of the local courtesan and a failed newspaper correspondent is drinking himself to death for lack of a story. 
 
But instead of outrunning its Furies, the brigade brings them to this seemingly idyllic palace, with fateful consequences for soldiers and citizens alike.

Little Infamies

'A very fine collection of connected short stories - funny, disturbing, ironic and bloody' - Annie Proulx, Daily Telegraph

Karnezis has captured the spirit of his people and spoken for them in a spellbinding, universal voice

Karnezis's robust prose, as luminous and flinty as his landscape, sharpens his focus on captive souls in a lonely place

Strikingly original... The stories in Little Infamies are extraordinary - shocking, colourful and resonant. Panos Karnezis is an entirely individual writer in full command of his material

A deeply impressive collection of short stories

Panos Karnezis' remarkable stories are all set in the same nameless Greek village. His characters are the people who live there - the priest, the barber, the whore, the doctor, the seamstress, the mayor - and the occasional animal: a centaur, a parrot that recites Homer, a horse called History. Their lives intersect, as lives do in a small place, and they know each other's secrets - the hidden crimes, the mysteries, the little infamies that men commit. Karnezis observes his villagers with a forgiving eye, and creates a world where magic invariably loses out to harsh reality, a world at once universal, funny and utterly compelling.

Panos Karnezis

In a remote corner of a Latin American rainforest, Father Thomas, a Catholic priest, comes across a badly wounded soldier and takes him to his church in an Indian village. 
 
The Indians, whose traditional way of life is under threat from outsiders, are wary of this latest new arrival. Venustiano, the proud young head of the village, is determined to protect his people, but feels powerless against the forces around him – and can trust nobody, not even Father Thomas. 
 
But his immediate problem is the bloodthirsty jaguar prowling around the village: for Venustiano is the only Indian with a gun, and he means to use it.

Panos Karnezis

The Fugitives

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