CRETANS Stories of a Beach

A native son returns to the island of Crete a hundred years after his family emigrates to America and East Africa. The writer builds a villa on a small cove and introduces English tourists to the locals; hilarious incidents and cultural misunderstandings are the order of the day. We meet Telis, the bearded surgeon who has gone native, Lefteris, the mustachioed shepherd who runs the beach taverna where the tourists congregate, Minos, a diminutive reformed pimp who becomes the author's building supervisor. A minister of the Thatcher government falls ill before help comes from an unexpected quarter. A new theory about the death in a plane crash of Prince William of Gloucester, a close friend of the writer, comes to light for the first time. A convent in the hills with its young attractive nuns poses a mystery as does the presence of a strange monk with a gun on his hip living alone in another monastery nearby. What is the secret of Pericles the psychiatrist with a strange obsession and that of Makis the bulldozer driver ordered to demolish a 3,800 year-old Minoan palace? The writer has heard from his Cretan grandparents about mysterious phenomena on the island and scoffs until he encounters the Drosolytes, the shadowy skywalkers of the Libyan sea. East and West clash. Myth and fact are interwoven and recounted with an observant eye for detail, compassion for human frailty and biting humour that cuts like a scalpel to reveal the inside workings of an island society in transition.
About the Author: Alexis Mantheakis is a Tanzanian-born Stanford educated Greek political analyst and writer who has had articles published in Vanity Fair, Esquire and in many magazines and newspapers. He is the former press spokesman, adviser and inner family circle member of the Onassis-Roussel family. Interviews with him have appeared in all major international media - CNN, NBC, BBC, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Point de Vue, VSD, Madison, Playboy, O Globo, Observer, USA Today, and many others. Former head of a Greek parliamentary party press office and spokesman for the party. He lives in Athens with his wife Dimitra Mantheakis, an archaeologist and best-selling Greek author. Alexis Mantheakis and his wife are co-founders of the International Parthenon Sculptures Action Committee Inc (NZ) that has 210,000 members worldwide through its social media groups. He is a vigorous campaigner for the cause and in November 2013 he visited Australia where he spoke at a world colloquium on the looted Parthenon sculptures issue at Sydney University and presented two satirical videos he created for the campaign. His latest book "SONGHOR - An African saga", is a rags-to-riches novel where the protagonist Emmanuel Makris, a handsome young stowaway from Ottoman-occupied Crete, finds himself forced ashore in pre-World War One German East Africa where after a few years he becomes the colony's most eligible and wealthiest bachelor before moving to a vast plantation near Lake Victoria in Kenya. Mantheakis brings his own experiences during the Mau Mau revolt to the novel and describes priviliged and quirky colonial life with its steamy love affairs and scandals that marked an era of danger, glamour and political struggle as the British Empire lived its last heady days. Alexis Mantheakis is currently working on his fourth book.