KALAMAS AND ACHERON

What is Acheron? A river in the north-west of Greece, in Epirus, which in ancient Greek mythology, was the boundary between life and death. What is Kalamas? It too is a river, in the same region, which Byron associated with the Acheron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and History, after a hundred and fifty years was to give it, in a dramatic way, the same meaning. What is Kalamas and Acheron? A cycle of stories, closely connected, which can be read as a novel, where the two rivers become the boundary not only between life and death, but also between human passions of enemies and friends, between utopia and reality, love and violence, joy and misery, past and present, nostalgia and revulsion, memory and fantasy. And finally, a boundary like a taut rope, on which human fate teeters in the balance. Kalamas and Acheron is also the book that, when it was first published in 1985, won the First State Award.