The novel opens as Brexit looms in the UK and Greece is grappling with austerity and the refugee crisis. It is a land of mass tourism and ancient myth, where Europe’s oldest civilisation was long ago buried by tsunami, but underneath lie folk legends of revenants and demons and  an unnerving silence about more recent history. The narrator is Ri, a successful artist who has worked in London all her life. When her English husband dies she turns to her roots on Crete, only to discover they are not what she thought. Unearthing her parents’ stories transforms her relationship to her family, her country and herself. It  looks back to resistance to the German occupation, with echoes of earlier risings against Turkish rule but is also a very contemporary story. As lockdown and coronavirus transform life across the globe we see an artist who has lived by seeing, discover how very much she has not seen – and that she carries in herself the shade of someone she never heard of. She has to see herself newly, and paint from a different self.