An exploration of grief and recovery as a woman flees her London family to return to the ancestral Greek island that she never knew. There is a touching sympathetic warmth to this novel but its opening is weakened by the knowledge of impending tragedy;n a knowledge derived entirely from the strapline and the synopsis on the cover. It is further diminished by its failure to convey the passage of the decades except in the most literal sense. There is little sense of growth among the characters. For all that, however, it was a pleasant diversion during the act of reading.

On mantelpiece with other books.