Captain Corelli's Mandolin: Louis De Bernieres

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Unfortunately without giving too much away there are moments in the novel that rely on a plot contrivances that feel unearned. Sitting in the garden of the house in Paliki he has lived in since the 30s with his wife Amalia - herself a former EAM member who was tortured after the war - Neochorotis gives his view of the Corelli story: “De Bernières’s book is an insult to the whole Greek people. The Italians make fun of Hitler as they march through the streets and, shockingly for Kokolios, some of them seem to be communist.

Corelli begins to play mandolin for Pelagia and the two talk about their dreams for life after the war. A teenage recruit to the resistance youth organisation during the Italian fascist and Nazi German occupations of the island - his father was imprisoned by the Germans after a collaborator’s tip-off - Eleftheratos was forced into political exile during the ensuing civil war and spent 11 years working his way around the world, from Mao’s China to Ethiopia and Australia, where he picked up the nickname Lefty Freeman.Prior to occupying Cephalonia, the Italians invaded Albania in what was widely considered to be a poorly thought-out plan; Carlo and Francisco are involved in this invasion, and they also participate in the invasion of Greece from Albania in the fall of 1940. But for all the extra income, large numbers of Cephalonians are deeply ambivalent about the Corelli phenomenon, and are far from being as grateful for their new-found celebrity as the film-makers seem to think they should be.

It also joins a number of contemporary novels that explore love and the human cost of World War Two, including Ian McEwan's Atonement and Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.It’s just that even the bits that I was interested in ended up amounting to little more than a line or two in someone’s letter. But of all de Bernières’s disparaging claims about the Cephalonian resistance, perhaps the most deeply resented by the island’s veterans is his insistence that the movement refused to come to the aid of the Italians when they turned on their former German allies at such terrible cost in the autumn of 1943. Now he is writing a book to counter de Bernières’s version of the island’s history and what he sees as its portrayal of Cephalonians as primitive and inhuman.