The Way to Colonos

A modern Greek classic "written in an ageless prose that instantly strikes the reader as the work of a master." (Rachel Cusk, from the foreword)
First published in 1961, The Way to Colonos reworks three plays by Sophocles in a modern-day setting, probing their characters with savage intimacy. Antigone, wheeling her father onto the ferry to Colonos, is a stylish woman in her thirties, disgusted by her father's self-absorption, guilt, and evasions. A suburban Electra dreams of a bloody confrontation with her mother that may never come to pass. The myth of Philoctetes, the castaway soldier, is reframed as a story of shifting allegiances in a guerrilla war that divided Greece after World War II.
As Rachel Cusk writes in her foreword to this new edition, the first in sixty years, Cicellis was a woman before her time, whose work-written in English, her second language-offers "shocking insight into the secret lives of young women" and is only now "free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority, who wish to see the world through sharp fresh eyes."

Kay Cicellis (1926-2001) was born to Greek parents in Marseilles, where she spent her first nine years. Having learned French and English in the nursery, she spent her later childhood in Athens and on her father's native island of Cephalonia. Her first stories, smuggled out of Athens during the Nazi occupation, were published in the British military press when she was a teenager. Her first story collection, The Easy Way, appeared with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West in 1950. Apart from The Way to Colonos, Cicellis published a second story collection, Death of a Town, and two novels, Ten Seconds from Now and No Name in the Street. With her husband she opened a fashionable restaurant in Athens and raised two children. Although she found it more difficult in later life to write in English, she continued to translate into both English and Greek.