Zorba the Greek is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba.

The narrator, a young Greek intellectual, resolves to set aside his books for a few months sets off for Crete to re-open a disused mine.

He meets a man who introduces himself as Alexis Zorba, a Greek who claims expertise as a chef, a miner, and player of the santuri.

The mine opens and work begins and the narrator and Alexis Zorba have a great many lengthy conversations, about a variety of things, from life to religion, each other’s past and how they came to be where they are now.

And the narrator learns a great deal about Humanity from Zorba that he otherwise had not gleaned from his life of books and paper.

The narrator absorbs a new zest for life from his experiences with Alexis Zorba and the other people around him, but reversal and tragedy mark his stay on Crete.

His one-night stand with a beautiful passionate widow leads to her public decapitation.

Having overcome one of his own demons (such as his internal ‘No,’ which the narrator equates with the Buddha, whose teachings he has been studying and about whom he has been writing for much of the narrative) and having a sense that he is needed elsewhere the narrator takes his leave.

It almost goes without saying that the two (the narrator and Alexis Zorba) will remember each other for the duration of their natural lives.