The Isle of Kheria Hardcover - 2012

From the jacket flap

Obsessed, crazed with grief at the loss of his wife, Joel, now living a reclusive life in a farm commune in Canada, learns of the death of his dearest friend, Aidan. He is compelled to journey to an island in Greece, Kher a, where Aidan had swum off into a storm and drowned. Joel's is a pilgrimage, seeking answers to doubts and guilt about their friendship and the motivations and circumstances of the death, seeking release from grief in atonement and resolution.

The novel traces the lives of the two men in Homeric journeys conducted largely in Joel's dream-world conversations with spirit visitations from his past. Overall is the presence of a foreboding inaccessible rock of an islet, Kh maera, Aidan's destination when he drowned a fateful mythic monster, a chimeric illusion. The extraordinary, intertwined, sometimes ambiguous lives of these two men are compelling stories, spanning much of the twentieth century: childhoods in England and New England; frontline soldiers in World War II; Greece with its civil war, its cruelties, its beauty, its crass materialism; brief years in US government service; rebellious, seeking alternative lives in Italy, England, in the US and Canada, in Greece; lives of tragic loves and, in the end, of profound reward.

Media reviews

Citations

• Foreword, 05/31/2012, Page 0
• Publishers Weekly, 03/05/2012, Page 48