Victoria Hislop is an English bestselling novelist. She started her career working in publishing, PR and as a journalist. In 2005, she published her first novel, The Island, which sold over two million copies worldwide and was adapted into a Greek television series, one of the most expensive television productions in Greece. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Victoria Hislop

Featured book by Victoria Hislop
The Island
The book follows Alexis on a journey to find out about her mother Sofia’s past in Crete. Determined to visit the island, she sets off to Greece. Here, she meets Fotini, a friend of her mother’s, who reveals to Alexis the story Sofia has been concealing all these years. Crete is immediately adjacent to the deserted island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony. The secret story of Alexis’ grandmother Eleni, her husband, and two daughters is one of tragedy, war, and love.
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The Hours
By Michael Cunningham
Recommended by: Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 1998 Awards: 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; 1999 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
London, 1923. Virginia Woolf is writing Mrs. Dalloway and struggling with her own deteriorating mental health. Los Angeles, 1949. Mrs. Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway and planning her husband’s birthday party. New York, 1999. Clarissa Vaughan is going out to…
Selected Poems
By CP Cavafy
Recommended by: Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 2008
A unique voice in the literary landscape of 20th-century Europe, Cavafy has the extraordinary ability to explore his interior world of passions and emotions in lyrical evocations of beautful men and illicit rendezvous, such as ‘One Night’, ‘I Have Gazed…
Machines Like Me
By Ian McEwan
Recommended by: Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 2019
Charlie, Miranda, and Adam are in a love triangle. But Adam is not human, he is a synthetic android whose personality has been co-designed by the couple. Set in an alternative 1980s London, Machines Like Me explores the depths of…
Barcelona Dreaming
By Rupert Thomson
Recommended by: Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 2021
On the eve of the 2008 financial crash, three interconnected stories are told by three characters, an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love. Looming over them, a crime…
War And Peace
By Leo Tolstoy
Recommended by: Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 1865-1867
Against the backdrop of the Napoleonic march on Russia in 1805, the lives of Pierre, Andrey, and Natasha collide with a cast of characters from the upper echelons of society to peasants and soldiers, and Napoleon himself. A great epic…
Wuthering Heights
By Emily Brontë
Recommended by: Antoine Laurain & Victoria Hislop
Publish Date: 1847
A tale of passion, torment, and revenge, Wuthering Heights is set in the Yorkshire Moors, where a supernatural occurrence will prompt Heathcliff to tell the tragic story of his love for Catherine, her marriage to the well-meaning Edgar, and his…