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Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Captain Corelli's Mandolin, released simultaneously in the United States as Corelli's Mandolin, is a novel of 1994 by the British writer Louis de Bernières, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Italian and German occupation of the Second World War.

The main characters are Antonio Corelli, an Italian army captain, and Pelagia, the daughter of the local physician, Dr Iannis. An important event in the novel is the massacre of Italian troops by the Germans in September 1943 – the Italian Acqui Division had refused to surrender and had fought the Germans for nine days before running out of ammunition. Some 1,500 Italian soldiers died in the fighting, 5,000 were massacred after surrendering, and the rest were shipped to Germany, of whom 3,000 drowned when the ship carrying them hit a mine.

In 2003, the novel was listed at number 19 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.

Synopsis

The story begins with Dr. Iannis, an experienced and multilingual doctor who has a well-established practice on the Greek island of Cephallonia. Iannis lives with his daughter Pelagia; Pelagia's mother died of tuberculosis when Pelagia was still a girl. Pelagia, now a young woman, is headstrong and intelligent, and has learned about medicine by observing her father. Some of the subsequent chapters, however, are told from the perspective of Carlo Guercio, a homosexual Italian man who has decided to join the Italian army which has been raised under the rule of Benito Mussolini during World War II.