Cartes Postales from Greece

Akis turns and sees the boy in the shadows at the back of the church. He is looking straight at him. The boy in the silvery suit is challenging him. As the child opens the door again, his suit is sharply illuminated by the light from outside. And then he is gone. For Ellie, a series of beautiful, mysterious postcards – addressed to a S. Ibbotson, and signed merely with the initial ‘A’ – serve as a lifeline of diversion in her otherwise flat life, lived out in a dreary London flat. A sudden impulse takes her to Athens, but her trip is heralded by an equally mysterious notebook that opens a magical and incredibly moving door to the tale behind those images. Gradually, Ellie realises that the past is reaching into the present and about to affect her in ways she couldn’t possibly predict… Nobody captures the glories and secrets of Greece like Victoria Hislop. From her stunning debut The Island in 2005, the searing family saga that has become a firm staple of Waterstones' fiction sections, Hislop has returned several times to the Greek heartland she knows so well, most notably perhaps in The Thread and The Sunrise - described by The Sunday Times as  ‘Intelligent and immersive.’