Book description
On her deathbed, Dee Denham, at one time the toast of colonial Cyprus,
tells her son Thomas that her illness is a punishment. Compelled by
grief and a confused childhood memory of betrayal, Thomas finds himself
searching for the meaning of her last words. He searches through faded
photographs and love letters, seeks out survivors and examines his own
imperfect recollections. A vanished world comes to life: the restless,
seductive island of Cyprus at the end of Empire, a place of oleander and
carob trees, cocktails at the Harbour Club and adultery in shuttered
bedrooms, peopled by ghostly admirers and conspirators, lovers and
spies. Dee's story, an intimate history of violence and tenderness for
which Thomas finds himself quite unprepared, gathers momentum, against,
in the background, the ominous roar of approaching disaster. A vivid
evocation of the past and a deft examination of the dangerous power of
memory, SWIMMING TO ITHACA sets fragile human relationships against the
unstoppable force of history and sheds new light on both. Simon Mawer
was born in 1948 in England, and spent his childhood there, in Cyprus
and in Malta. He now lives with his wife and two children in Italy, and
teaches at the English School in Rome.
