Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki📖

Summary of Three Summers

“Three Summers” is a nostalgic, sun-drenched novel about three teenage sisters – Maria, Infanta, and Katerina – who spend their youth at their family’s country house in Kifissia, an affluent suburb of Athens, during three idyllic summers in the 1930s. The novel explores family dynamics, the sisters’ first encounters with men, and their passage from adolescence to adulthood.

Reasons to read Three Summers

“Three Summers” is a gently paced summer novel about a Greek family and their circle of friends, set within a sheltered country house and its flourishing garden. At its heart are the three sisters, each trying to discover who they are and what they want from life. It is an exploration of youth, first love, family secrets, and the search for identity, seen through the eyes of three young Greek women. When it was first published in 1946, the novel was noted for its frank treatment of topics such as sex, desire, divorce, and abandonment, and it became a bestseller in Greece. Today, “Three Summers” is cherished by many readers as a modern classic of Greek literature. Margarita Liberaki was a Greek novelist and playwright, also known for novels such as “The Trees”, “The Other Alexander”, and “The Mystery”, and for plays such as “Candaules’ Wife”. She was the mother of Margarita Karapanou, author of “Kassandra and the Wolf”, another novel about growing up, though darker in tone than “Three Summers”.

Setting: Kifissia, Athens (Greece)

Original title: Τα ψάθινα καπέλα

Year of publication: 1946

Nr of pages: 264