Elspeth Barker
Greek Mythologies
The Enlightenment of Nina Findlay
By Andrea Gillies
Short Books 368pp £12.99 order from our bookshop
Andrea Gillies’s second novel explores themes of family relationships, self-deception, and the need for personal mythologies and secrets, set against the vivid colours of a Greek island as summer moves into autumn. Nina, the 45-year-old narrator, suffers a violent accident in the opening pages: ‘Puzzled goat faces peered down as blackness eliminated the sky.’ So far, so good. But then things decline. The accident is explained in one short sentence, dropped casually into the first of a series of uncountable flashbacks (‘she was profoundly unwell by then’); the reader will not learn the nature of her malaise for a long time. A pattern of withheld information begins here.
Her injuries confine her to the island’s cottage hospital, where she is attended by Dr Christos, whose English is perfect. While he writes up his case records at her bedside, Nina regales him with accounts of important moments in her life, embellished or understated according to mood. She lives normally
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony