is a story about love and separation.  It is also the story of an island.  Though the characters are all entirely fictional, the island of Spinalonga is a real place and people like those I have created for the novel once lived, loved and survived there.

Spinalonga is a mere pinprick on the map (no more than a few hundred metres each way) and is situated off the north coast of Crete.  The island has been a fortress, a smuggler’s retreat and from 1903 until 1957 a leper colony.  This story takes place during its final years as a leper colony and weaves together fictional characters and events along with documented facts about the history and daily life of Spinalonga.

Just opposite the island and almost within swimming distance, lies the fishing village of Plaka.  For the 50 years during which Spinalonga was a leper colony, the two places relied heavily on each other.  The people of Spinalonga desperately needed supplies and the inhabitants of Plaka, although repelled by the colony, depended on the income the leper colony guaranteed them.  It was a strange, unusual and dangerous symbiosis.

Until the 1950’s when effective treatment was discovered, leprosy was one of the most feared and loathed of all diseases.  Although we associate it, thanks to films such as Ben Hur, with hideously deformed faces and gnarled limbs, it can in fact take years for signs to manifest themselves.  Until the signs actually appear, a sufferer may not even know that they have been affected and the initial indications may be scarcely noticeable – a slight numbness in some areas of the body, for example, or an almost imperceptible change of pigmentation on an area of skin.  In the past people did everything they could to hide leprosy because it could mean lifelong separation from their families and often incarceration in a leper colony where they would languish and eventually die.  Encouraged by the Bible to treat lepers as “unclean”, communities were very afraid of having them in their midst.  Before the discovery in the 19th century that leprosy, just like other diseases, was caused by a bacteria, it was considered a curse.  People thought that if you had leprosy, you were being punished by God for your sins and hence shame was brought to your family too. 

On my very first visit to Spinalonga in 2001, what struck me about the place was that it was just like many other villages in rural Greece.  There were little houses with wooden balconies, a church, stray cats and urns filled with basil or geraniums.  There was, however, one vital ingredient missing.  People.  Both the silence and the atmosphere were uncanny, but the people who had once lived there had certainly left something of themselves behind.

From this strong sense of what their lives
might have been like grew the story of