Set on the Greek island of Lefkada in the mid twentieth century. If you like the novels of Victoria Hislop or Sofka Zinovieff then this book is for you.
August 1935. A grandmother presses a school notebook into her granddaughter's hands at the village panegyri and says: write what you see. Someone should remember.
What Maroula sees, over the next thirteen years, is the Italian occupation, the arrests, the famine, the resistance forming in the mountains above the village - and then something worse than any of it. Neighbours turning on neighbours in a conflict that on this island began before the rest of Greece even knew it had started.
She writes it all down. Then she hides the diary in the wall of the family house, takes the ferry to Athens, and never comes back.
Seventy years later, her granddaughter Io goes to the village to clear the house after Maroula's death. Behind a stone that moves, she finds the notebook. She reads it. She must decide whether to let it speak - because what it contains has never been safe to know.
The novel is told in two voices - Maroula's diary and her granddaughter Io's present-day narrative. Maroula's voice matures from a twelve-year-old's breathless observation to the compressed precision of a young woman who has survived occupation, resistance, and civil war. The whole novel is from the perspective of the women caught up in the conflict of war and then civil war - a perspective not often told in historical fiction.
If you have walked through the mountain villages of Lefkada's interior and wondered why so many houses stand empty, their doors sealed, their terraces returning to scrub - this novel is the answer. It is the story of what happened to the people who built those houses, farmed those terraces, and played music in those squares. Told through the diary of a fictional girl and her family - but every event she witnesses is documented, every place she walks is real. Hidden for seventy years. Still not entirely safe to tell. In a recent photograph exhibition in Lefkada, two photographs were removed on the first day. The reason was never stated.
"So movingly real and so convincingly speaks the truth for itself and for history. How someone - let alone an Englishman - entered so naturally, deeply and unpretentiously into the psyche of a place and a people is an achievement."
- Christos Pittas, composer, resident of Alexandros, Lefkada
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