“Yet as I stood absorbing the atmosphere, consciously rendering myself perceptive to its beauty, I suddenly had a vision of myself standing there. A solitary human figure in the golden-orange landscape. A golden-orange girl standing silent and alone.” Lydia has come to Villa Ariadne in search of a sanctuary, a quiet retreat set amongst the olive groves of Crete, far from the demands of the busy world. A place where she can heal, can think, perhaps recover the precious thing she has lost - her beloved torment, her ability to write. Somehow it seems to have become lost in the hectic traffic of London and has defied all her attempts to find it. Yet perhaps in Villa Ariadne, where the only sounds are the waves breaking gently on the shore and the hypnotic rhythm of the cicadas amongst the olives, the gift that has abandoned her might be restored. The beautiful Mediterranean summer is hers, a precious gift, and she determines to use the solitude to concentrate solely on her writing. Yet inspiration proves frustratingly elusive and solitude can be just a hair’s breadth from loneliness, and soon a great fear begins to grow in her that what she has lost will never return. Then a casual visit to the ancient Minoan palace at Phaistos changes everything. She has a chance encounter with Alec Preston, a Canadian archaeologist working on a dig over the summer months with his students. Alec is clearly obsessed with uncovering the rich and ancient history of Crete, but it soon emerges that he has another reason to be there – one that is deeply personal. He reveals that his father had been stationed there during the Second World War and had won a reputation for great bravery with the Cretan resistance. But father and son had never been close and Sandy Preston would never talk about those days, adamantly refusing to answer his son’s questions. Now that his father is dead and has taken his secrets with him beyond the grave, Alec has become obsessed with finding out exactly what happened during those violent days of the German occupation that gained his father such a legendary reputation. Soon Alec’s quest and Lydia’s become inextricably entwined as they set about tracing the few survivors of the war that might be able to shed light on what happened. Yet the more they uncover about Alec’s heroic father, the more Lydia feels a sense of unease about their quest. A nagging sense takes hold of her that something does not add up and that for every piece of information they uncover, another is being hidden. Inexplicably, she gets the feeling that Alec’s fixation with his father’s past may be playing with fire. For whilst excavating the ancient past may be fascinating but safe, exposing more recent events might prove much more perilous.
