Eleni Gage Livres

“Wherever I go, Greece wounds me,” the Nobel-prize-winning poet George Seferis wrote. Andreas Smaragdis’ photos serve as a balm to that wound, by preserving an image of a beloved landscape and offering a hint of what the photographer calls “the ecstasy of place.” This book, then, with the truly exceptional text by Eleni Gage, a New York-based journalist, author and instructor at Columbia University, is a flirtation, meant to invite the reader to venture onto miracle ground.

In North of Ithaka, Eleni Gage returns to the remote Greek village of Lia, where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, to rebuild the ruins of her namesake's home and come to terms with her family's tragic history. In doing so, she leaves behind a sparkling social life and successful career to continue the tale of a family and a place which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous over twenty years ago with his international bestseller, Eleni. Along the way she survives humorous misadventures, absorbs fascinating folklore, and comes to understand that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present. Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home.