Even though "it's definitely a civil war where both sides behaved appallingly", she notes that "the Resistance fought the Germans all the way through the war ... And then at the end of it, they're shoved to one side, and these collaborators are handed back the country. I can see why that would have made them very angry ... I think I would have been on their side."
Chart-topping popular fiction rarely, if ever, sets out to navigate such stormy seas. The astonishing impact in both Britain and Greece of The Island, her début novel in 2005, first pointed to Hislop's flair for mixing bittersweet cocktails from the gentle sensations of a sun-dappled Mediterranean romance and the sour tang of a painful, and unresolved, past. That book took its army of readers to another offshore domain of secrets, the Cretan leper colony of Spinalonga.
Hislop now calls it "quite a naive book" as well as "a very, very affectionate portrait of the Greeks - certainly of Crete. It's meant to be. I love that place. I absolutely do." Her family - husband Ian, editor of Private Eye, and their two children - have a house on Crete, where she retreats to write.
Ian - who also studied English at Oxford, and in the same year - never reads her novels until she writes "The End", she says. "I'm good at taking criticism, but not from him. I try to make it the best it possibly can be before he sees it."
After she made big news with The Island, fans might have expected more of the same from The Return, set around Granada during the Spanish Civil War. But for all its gypsy mood-music and charming star-crossed lovers, that book - once more a number one best-seller - fused its battlefront romance with a pretty uncompromising view of the war. She presented it not as a vague bloody backcloth but a world-shaking collision between decent, democratic values and Franco's brutal fascism.
In The Thread the focus - and a principal character - is the port city of Thessaloniki. Once the multicultural metropolis of Salonica, it became a Greek possession only when the moribund Ottoman empire yielded control in 1912-1913.
Via a trademark Hislop time-shift, we drop back from the waterfront cafes of the modern city to 1917: year of the Great Fire that laid waste to old Salonica, and of the birth of the future couple whose path we trace through the upheavals of the Greek 20th century.
"The first time I went to Thessaloniki," Hislop remembers, "was to give a talk at the university, which is probably the least attractive building." Soon, though, she came to love that city. The Thread voices that passion, with especially warm evocations of the Muslim and Jewish communities swept away by the fatal tides of history.
"Lots of things came together" to compose the novel's background, she says, "but it was principally that idea of the refugee, and what it means to be Greek". Hislop, a Greek speaker, talked to the cast and crew during the filming for the Greek series of The Island - a giant hit with the country's viewers, like the novel itself.
She discovered how many had family roots in Asia Minor: "That got me very curious."
Helped by recent histories such as Mark Mazower's landmark study Salonica: City of Ghosts and Bruce Clark's Twice a Stranger, she saw what the influx of so many newcomers around 1923 had meant for the nation.
"It's the equivalent of suddenly having 12 or 15 million refugees coming into Britain."
We know from the off that our protagonists will eventually meet and marry. Dimitri is the idealistic son of a gruffly patriarchal cloth merchant; Katerina, a refugee from Adia Minor separated from her mother amid the chaos of the mass migrations, is happily adopted and now a nimble-fingered seamstress for the Moreno family of Jewish tailors.
Hislop guides us through decade after decade of modern Greek catastrophes. From the war with Turkey and the population exchange that ended it (Christians came to Greece; Muslims went to Turkey), through the anti-Nazi struggle and the vicious feuds of the civil war, right up to the Colonels' dictatorship and its lingering legacy, we understand via set-piece climaxes and domestic interludes of repose just how much the nation in general, and this city in particular, have had to endure and overcome.
With screens and newspapers now swarming with images of Greek unrest, Hislop hopes that her novel may help British readers to "see a bit below the surface" of today's turmoil. "I learnt so much myself from doing the research," she says. "I sympathise much more with why they are how they are." For instance, when scolding Germans speak of debts and downgrades, many Greeks will think of the nation's plundering by its Nazi occupiers.
She has friends who are "still angry at the way the country was bankrupted during the Occupation. It was done quite methodically - there was a monthly payment - in a legalised, bureaucratic way. At the end of the war, they had destroyed the roads and bridges. They had taken all the gold, taken all the food. There was nothing in that country."
The Thread will entertain and enlighten legions of readers. Its oddly vehement political edge and fervent multicultural sympathies cut through the helpings of schmaltz and sentiment to generate Hislop's characteristic sour-sweet flavour. That taste can clearly tickle the palate of millions.
The Thread (Headline $36.99) is out now.
- INDEPENDENT
