Cretans Stories of a Beach

A native son returns to the island of Crete a hundred years after his family emigrates to America and East Africa. The writer builds a villa on a small cove and introduces English tourists to the locals; hilarious incidents and cultural misunderstandings are the order of the day. We meet Telis, the bearded surgeon who has gone native, Lefteris, the mustachioed shepherd who runs the beach taverna where the tourists congregate, Minos, a diminutive reformed pimp who becomes the author's building supervisor. A minister of the Thatcher government falls ill before help comes from an unexpected quarter. A new theory about the death in a plane crash of Prince William of Gloucester, a close friend of the writer, comes to light for the first time. A convent in the hills with its young attractive nuns poses a mystery as does the presence of a strange monk with a gun on his hip living alone in another monastery nearby. What is the secret of Pericles the psychiatrist with a strange obsession and that of Makis the bulldozer driver ordered to demolish a 3,800 year-old Minoan palace? The writer has heard from his Cretan grandparents about mysterious phenomena on the island and scoffs until he encounters the Drosolytes, the shadowy skywalkers of the Libyan sea. East and West clash. Myth and fact are interwoven and recounted with an observant eye for detail, compassion for human frailty and biting humour that cuts like a scalpel to reveal the inside workings of an island society in transition.