The Greek Village Series.: Books One, Two and Three. (The Greek Village Collection)

Sara Alexi's Greek Village Series provides a unique perspective on rural Greek village life that readers all over the world have come to love.

Here the first three books in the series are presented together.

THE ILLEGAL GARDENER

Driven by a need for some control in her life, Juliet sells up on impulse and buys a dilapidated farmhouse in a tiny Greek village, leaving her English life behind.

The house is livable by local standards, but the job of restoring the garden is too big. It requires strength. Juliet cannot bring it to life on her own.

Around the olive tree, hidden beneath the covering of bindweeds, are mattresses, broken chairs, shepherds' crooks, and old goat bells, the remains of past lives intertwined in a slow decay. The beauty of the garden is lost with the years of neglect and no one to appreciate it.

Juliet reluctantly enlists casual labour. She has no desire to share her world with anyone. The boys have grown, Mick has gone. This is her time now.

Aaman has travelled to Greece from Pakistan illegally. His task is to find work and raise money for the harvester his village desperately needs to deliver them out of poverty. Poverty that is sending the younger generation to the cities, dividing families, and slowly destroying his community.

What he imagined would be a heroic journey in reality is fraught with danger and corruption. He finds himself in Greece and follows the work, a little here, a little there. As time passes, he loses his sense of self. He is now an immigrant worker, illegal, displaced, unwanted, with no value. Some days he does not have enough money to feed himself, let alone to return home to Pakistan.

In the village square, he waits for work, dawn not even broken.

Juliet hires Aaman.

Neither is entirely comfortable with their role. Juliet the Westerner, who has money and a valid passport, resents the intrusion even though she wants her garden cleared. Aaman needs the work and money but resents the humiliation.

As the summer progresses, even though they are from vastly different backgrounds, cultures apart, they discover they have something in common, an event that has defined how they interact and even how they view themselves. Pieces of their lives they have kept hidden even from themselves are exposed. They are each other's catalysts to facing their own ghosts...

BLACK BUTTERFLIES

Although the island looks harmless, Marina knows it harbours ghosts from the past. Nothing would induce her to visit there again - except to protect her daughter.

Sara Alexi's second book is a romp packed with a troupe of colourful characters intertwining in a gripping story.

By turn uproariously funny, touching or sad this book is the stuff of which all families are made.

Hopes, fears, secrets and misunderstandings beset relationships.

Discovery and acceptance bridge a divide.

THE EXPLOSIVE NATURE OF FRIENDSHIP

Do you like books about people? Then you'll love this intimate portrait of a man searching for meaning...

Set in an idyllic Greek village, with a backdrop of sea and sun, this book will transport you...

Mitsos has spent the last twenty years trying to comes to terms with the events of a single day and all that led up to it. In his twilight years a surprising turn of events gives him a chance to rectify his biggest wrong and give himself the peace he is seeking.

But is what he has wanted for the last twenty years what he still wants now and is he the man he thought he was?

Set against a backdrop of a small Greek farming village, comedy and tragedy are present in equal measures.

Sara transports you to a land of sea and sun as she explores what it means to be human, and fallible.

The book examines the nature of friendship, and how our choices and our perceptions of our place in society can define us.

Also in the series:
The Gypsy's Dream
The Art Of Becoming Homeless
In The Shade Of The Monkey Puzzle Tree