The Thread

Starred review from May 21, 2012
When Turkish troops force the people of Smyrna from their homes in 1922, a young girl named Katerina becomes separated from her mother amid the chaos. Taken in by a fellow refugee with two daughters of her own, Katerina and her surrogate family make a new life together in the Greek city of Thessaloniki. Katerina soon meets Dimitri, the young son of a wealthy businessman, who is living nearby while his mother remodels their mansion on the sea. The novel takes place over the course of their lifetimes, and tracks the crossing of their paths as they struggle to survive and nurture a love indifferent to dogma and national conflict in a city beleaguered by political, social, and emotional turbulence, including Nazi occupation, Communist backlash, civil war, and poverty. . Hislop (The Island) is a clever storyteller who deftly manages to flesh out Katerina and Dimitri’s personal lives, while never abandoning the collective for the sake of the individual—20th-century Greece and her citizens are brought vividly to life. Striking an excellent balance between historicity and impassioned drama, Hislop’s newest should not be missed. Agent: Melanie Jackson.

May 15, 2012
Combining a keen eye for detail with her usual fluid writing style, Hislop presents an engrossing excursion to Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest metropolis, a relatively unexplored setting for fiction. By the novel's end, however, readers will be intimately acquainted with its troubled politics and rich cultural heritage. The Thread begins in 1917 and spans 90 years, tracing the lives of Dimitri, son of a wealthy, coldhearted cloth merchant, and Katerina, who arrives as a child refugee from Smyrna after the Greco-Turkish War and becomes a skilled embroiderer in a Jewish family's workshop. Circumstances place them in the same neighborhood on Irini Street, whose kindly residents make up for its lack of affluence. Childhood friends, Dimitri and Katerina eventually fall in love and marry, an event foreshadowed by the novel's modern frame. Their interwoven stories skillfully incorporate Greece's Nazi occupation and civil war, in which Dimitri takes a risky antigovernment stance. This fast-moving, touching saga about tragedy, recovery, and the real meaning of family is full of dramatic incidents demonstrating the city's transformation and resilience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)