Zorba the Greek follows a young intellectual who travels to Crete to reopen a lignite mine and meets Alexis Zorba, a labourer, wanderer, musician, sensualist, survivor, and walking argument against overthinking one’s way out of existence.

The book is a collision between the life of the mind and the life of the body: books versus hunger, abstraction versus dance, order versus catastrophe, with the Cretan landscape pressing in from every side. Kazantzakis’ novel is earthy, excessive, philosophical, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable in the way older books tend to be when they have not been sanded down for modern nerves. Defs not one for you if you're looking for hope in the 'maybe some people in the past were okay?' misogyny department. 

A strong pick for readers of European classics, philosophical fiction, mythic realism, and novels about men trying to understand freedom without first becoming remotely sensible.

Faber open market paperback, 1995; second printing. Good reading copy, with light cover wear, page toning, and minor edge wear.