Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis tells the story of a quiet, intellectual narrator who travels to Crete to reopen a lignite mine and falls in with Alexis Zorba, a weathered older workman full of appetite, song, and hard-won wisdom. Zorba dances, argues, loves, and grieves with his whole body, and his way of meeting life head-on slowly cracks open the narrator's careful, book-bound habits. Set against a vivid Cretan village, the novel weighs the life of the mind against the life of the senses and comes down, again and again, on the side of living fully. Tim Ferriss includes it on his list of the top fiction books for non-fiction readers.
What you might want to know about Zorba the Greek
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A bookish young Greek narrator opens a mine on Crete with the help of Zorba, an older laborer whose hunger for life upends everything the narrator thinks he knows.
Yes. The 1964 film adaptation starring Anthony Quinn as Zorba is well known and won several Academy Awards.
Zorba the Greek was written by Nikos Kazantzakis, published in 1946 by Simon & Schuster.
Zorba the Greek is 352 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Zorba the Greek takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
Zorba the Greek is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.