This is a Mediterranean love story. At the height of the Swinging Sixties Viola and Adam meet on an old Greek liner packed with like minded young Australians looking for adventure and experience in Europe.

Rejecting the conventional path to Earls Court the couple find themselves, after a series of fateful choices, heading for the island of Crete. There they fall in with an international community of expatriates, an exotic mixture of castaways, eccentrics, sybarites and artists.

In spite of their meagre funds the young lovers rent a dilapidated villa overlooking the ancient Venetian harbour of Chania. But Crete is a difficult location to fit into, particularly for an attractive young woman like Viola.

In 1967 the Greek government is overthrown by a military coup and its colonels attempt to repress the Greeks’ natural joie de vivre in the name of “Christian-Hellenic” values. Chania becomes a powder keg of vice and passion.

It contains a naval base on its outskirts that is the barracks for eight thousand Greek sailors doing national service. After Viola is abducted and almost raped by one of the ratings she and Adam are encouraged by an American painter called Sylvia Naughton to move to a village where she has lived for eleven years on the island of Lesbos.

Her work is dedicated to capturing the disappearing traditional currents of village life in her paintings. The move proves fortuitous.

In contrast to the macho south this island is sophisticated, filled with evidence of a glorious past and haunted by the presence of the sixth century BC poet Sappho. Could this be the exceptional life Viola is searching for? The expatriate clan on Lesbos is dominated by various powerful personalities like Isaac Romberg, a Canadian and self-declared poet laureate.

His extrovert exuberance and domination of his wife Vita is challenged by an English classicist called Charity Lane who has experienced war first hand and whose scepticism as a result towards human ideals brings the two men into witty, wordy conflict with no hold bared. The island itself and its natural magnificence cast a seductive spell over these comic/ tragic adventurers, distorting their pasts and exposing the vulnerability of their secret desires.

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