Tres Veranos

Caterina, the young narrator of this great classic of 20th-century Greek literature, loves the rain and the sun, the domestic animals she lives with, solitary walks among olive and pine trees and Sundays on the beach, the textures and colors of her surroundings: she looks at the world with the dazzle and intensity of a sixteen-year-old. She lives in a house in the countryside on the outskirts of Athens with her divorced mother, an aunt marked by a trauma from her youth and her two older sisters, who have a very different character and aspirations from those of the protagonist, who loves, above all, the unknown, adventure. The character who embodies all the desires of our narrator is the Polish grandmother, who one day disappeared to start an independent life outside of marriage and far from her daughters. Of the grandmother, only the memory of her resounding decision remains, but, despite the fact that the family has disowned her, she constitutes a guardian figure for Caterina. As the heroine and her sisters party, face their first love troubles, and deal with the heat over the course of three summers in this beautiful coming-of-age novel, they try to understand the strange desires of adults and constantly wonder what kind of people they want to become. Three Summers is a broad portrait of a diverse, complex, and at times contradictory femininity, a story that encapsulates all the charm of those moments that inadvertently end up becoming the defining moments of a life only when one looks back.