Marjory McGinn’s Sharp, Funny Take on the Mani and Koroni
Marjory McGinn arrived in the southern Peloponnese in 2010 with her husband Jim and a terrier named Wallace, at the exact moment the country tipped into crisis. One reader review pinned her tone as somewhere between Gerald Durrell and Bill Bryson, and that comparison holds up across all four books: a journalist’s eye for the telling detail, paired with a willingness to let herself look ridiculous when the story calls for it.
Things Can Only Get Feta opens the series with that first year in a Mani village, and the humor sits right on the surface. Wallace the terrier gets nearly as much narrative real estate as the humans, from a notorious bathroom trick to an obsession with chicken so consuming that, as one reviewer put it, she never looked at a backpack the same way again. McGinn also turns her own mistakes into material rather than hiding them, retelling the mangled Greek words that had the villagers teasing her mercilessly, and the effect is a book that laughs at her before it laughs at anyone else.
Underneath the comedy is a real character study: Foteini, a local farmer who recurs across all four books, is drawn with enough tenderness that reviewers describe missing her like family by the final page. The book’s central subject, the bureaucratic and financial chaos of Greece’s crisis years, gets filtered through village-level absurdities: badly placed garbage dumpsters, road repairs that never quite finish, and a car re-registration process McGinn concludes only a masochist with money to spare would attempt. Her prose has a sharp, image-driven quality too, comparing elderly churchgoers to old roses pressed between the pages of a heavy book, or describing her own outrage at a nosy question about her rent as sounding like a librarian ambushed in the reference section.
Homer’s Where the Heart Is carries the story into a second year in the Mani, with McGinn and Jim now sharing an olive grove with their Greek landlords as the crisis worsens around them. The humor stays, but the book adds a darker, more personal thread: McGinn’s own history working in Athens during the 1970s military dictatorship, woven in alongside the unrest she is witnessing in real time. It is also something of a literary pilgrimage, including a visit to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s house in Kardamyli shortly after his death, a detail worth flagging for any reader tracing the region’s literary geography.
A Scorpion in the Lemon Tree relocates the couple to a rented house near Koroni for a second Greek chapter, this time with the financial crisis in full swing. The comic set pieces continue, including the scorpion invasion that gives the book its title and a series of hair-raising road trips, but McGinn also spends real time with the local priest, offering a window into a side of village life the earlier books had only touched on. Not every reader was won over here: one reviewer, a longtime British homeowner in the area, felt McGinn’s attention was still with the Mani and that Koroni never quite got the same depth of treatment, a fair caveat for anyone reading the series specifically for its portrait of that town.
A Donkey on the Catwalk closes the series as a collection rather than a straight continuation, mixing Mani stories with previously unpublished material from McGinn’s earlier years in the country: a stint teaching English in Athens during a politically dangerous period, a run-in with dubious religious relics in Corfu, and a Cretan sabbatical that veered off script. Foteini returns for one of the series’ most purely comic threads, styling increasingly outlandish outfits for herself and for Riko the donkey, the source of the book’s title and, by most reader accounts, its biggest laugh.
Read together, the four books are less a relocation guide than a document of what settling into a place actually costs and returns: mangled Greek, a temperamental terrier, a donkey in couture, and, running underneath all of it, a genuine and well-earned affection for the people who eventually let her in. McGinn has since extended that affection into fiction, with two novels set in the same region, A Saint for the Summer and How Greek Is Your Love?, both regular fixtures on Amazon’s Greek bestseller lists.
Peloponnese Locations & Living
Beyond the books, this corner of Greece is easy to explore in real life—nearby spots even served as Peloponnese movie locations for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. If you are considering a longer stay, see our guide to living in Kalamata for an overview of daily life in the region’s main coastal hub.
PUBLICATION DETAILS
The Peloponnese Series
Things Can Only Get Feta, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013
Homer's Where the Heart Is, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015
A Scorpion In The Lemon Tree, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016
A Donkey On The Catwalk, Pelagos Press, 2021
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