The Devine Sagas

  In Greece, Easter is the most fabulous time of the year. For families, it’s the must-time to eat, drink, and be merry together. In my four years in Greece, I learned to celebrate Easter like a Greek. Just in terms of fun, it’s key to celebrate in the embrace of a real Greek family, when the traditional roasting of a lamb outside becomes a daylong center of the action. In the countryside and  on the islands, it begins maybe the day before with someone digging a pit. In Athens, it happens on the  rooftops, where a rigged-up roasting is engineered.  Easter morning the lamb roast begins over a real  fire. The men—what always seems to be a succession of the uncles—hunker down to oversee the  continual turning of the lamb, basting it all day with aromatic and alcoholic marinades.   It’s always hot on this radiant Greek Sunday, and soon the sweating uncles discard their shirts.  Music comes from somewhere and everywhere, and everyone else sings an...

  Laurie Devine is so, so happy to announce that finally Kronos , her award-winning Greek family saga, is being published in the United States. Kronos is now available for the first time in a digital edition on Amazon Kindle. Kronos is written by the award-winning American author Laurie Devine and was first published in London in 1991 by Andre Deutsch.  It became an international best-seller and was a special favorite in Australia, which is home away from home to many hundreds of thousands of Greeks. Kronos is expected to be even more popular in the United States, where an estimated three million Greek Americans now live but retain pride in the country of their ancestors. Kronos It is a passionate powerful multi-generational family saga set not only in contemporary Greece but also among resettled Greeks in America’s New England. Its story centers on a wily Greek beauty who is loved by two brothers – one a leftist leader and the other a rightwing colonel. The unforgetta...

  Possibly the best thing that ever happened for Greek Americans was this film. This romantic comedy, released in 2002, made Greek Americans loveable. Perhaps one of the most loveable minorities in the USA.  For a time, Greek mothers perhaps became more legendary even than Italian ones. Or maybe (or maybe not) for the classic Jewish mothers. Who can trump a Jewish mother in full cry?  But the Greeks in this film came close. However you rank bossy mothers, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” made the excessive demands of the Mediterranean matriarchal family once again hysterically funny.  American audiences who didn’t know much about Greek family structures had their own never-forgotten family dynamics which were triggered by the film. But this time it was so, so funny! The storyline had a young Greek American woman who lived in Chicago and worked in her family restaurant fall in love with a non-Greek-American man.  Laugh-out-loud situations ensued. Eventually...

  Looking for some tasty souvlaki? Search not just in Athens but in Boston, Chicago, or—especially—in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Greeks, along with an overflowing handful of other ethnicities and nationalities—including Jews, Irish, Armenians and so many others—are scattered all over the world.  Mostly, just as with Greece, that’s due to a poisonous stew of reasons—usually poverty and lack of jobs combined with political instability and deadly repressions. So it is that Kronos, my modern Greek family saga being published for the first time in the United States this spring, is situated among the Greek expatriate community in Boston as well as back in the Greek mainland and islands. How that happens reflects some of the greatest crises of modern Greek history.  Greece languished economically as well as politically under Nazi Occupation during World War II. That struggle morphed into a bitter three-year civil war between the Greek left and right, resulting afterward ...

  Long ago, when I was young and prolific, these Devine Sagas were first published. A few of them here in America, but all five of them in Europe, where I used to live. Some of them were international bestsellers, even! But why, you may ask, am I publishing digital editions of all of them? A simple, demographic answer:  So eventually my books will survive me.  As it happened, I wrote these novels nearly fifty years ago.  All are family sagas starring adventurous women set in exotic locations in the Middle East and in and around Greece, beginning in my early thirties and continuing for the next 25 or so years.  At that time, digital books were not common. People just bought hardcovers and paperbacks. And it is sad but true that, with the exception of mostly mega bestsellers, bound books went out of print as early as two years after they were published. You can maybe find stray “old” copies on used book websites. And probably a carton or so of their own hardc...