HERE AT LAST is the novel that legions of admirers of Captain Corelli's Mandolin have been impatiently awaiting for a decade. Once again the setting is the Eastern Mediterranean; and once again the theme is the conflict between war and peace, prejudice and tolerance.

In the prologue, a potter called Iskander sums up the fortunes - and, as the twentieth century advances, the misfortunes - of his fellow inhabitants in a small, picturesque town on the coast of South East Anatolia. Unfortunately, the idiom in which he does so is as artificial as that