Captain Corelli's Mandolin
A love story set on a Greek island during WWII that asks the hardest question: what does love owe to history, to duty, to survival? Pelagia and Corelli are beautifully drawn; the novel around them is richly comic and then catastrophically sad. The mandolin music runs through it like a leitmotif for joy in the face of annihilation.
Greek veterans had reason to object: de Bernières paints the communist partisans as bandits and sadists, a portrait that provoked real protest on Kefalonia, and it warps the book's last act. The final contrivance is worse; Corelli stays away for roughly half a century over a glimpsed misunderstanding, then returns white-haired as if love keeps. The whimsy and the atrocities never agree on a tone.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
