To the Island

A deeply moving and richly textured story about a woman's search for her Greek birth-father in modern-day Greece and her journey into the dark heart of contemporary Greek history.

He disappeared. That's all she really knew. In search of her father Andreas, whom she has never met, Lena travels with her small son from Australia to Greece. On the island of Naxos she finds him, a wary, tormented man living in self-imposed exile and haunted by what happened to him under the rule of the Colonels in the 1960s. Slowly Lena unlocks the secrets of her father's past, and in getting to know him begins to understand the dark realities of contemporary Greek history. To the Island is a book about the impact of larger political events on the lives of ordinary people, and how political and personal betrayals reverberate across generations, beautifully evoking the currents and cross-currents between individuals, within families and in broader society. And in Lena and Andreas's stories, it shows how difficult it is to confront our personal and collective pasts - and the terrible consequences of being unable to do so.