Publisher's synopsis
An Australian woman returns alone to the Greek village house where she was once welcomed as a bride. Unsure of her reception after a divorce and an absence of many years, she has come to mourn the old man and take part in the age-old traditions of Easter week. Bell is still bound, by her son and by the past, to this family and its matriarch Kyria Sofia. The old warmth between the two women is quick to surface, but so too are old grievances and misunderstandings. Brimming with dreams and memories, the house reasserts its claim on Bell. As the family gathers for the Resurrection, she is fighting for her soul. Readers of Milk and Home Time will welcome the return of Bell to the fold of rural Greece with all its riches and austerities of culture and tradition.
Beverley Farmer was born in Melbourne in 1941. After graduating from the University of Melbourne she worked in the restaurant trade and taught English and French in secondary schools. In 1965 she married a Greek migrant and they went to live, for three years, under the Junta in his parents’ village on the Macedonian plain north of Thessaloniki. While there she wrote her first book, Alone (1980). Several of the stories in the collections Milk (1983) and Home Time (1985) draw on her experience of Greece, as does her novel The House in the Light (1995). Beverley Farmer has an adult son. She lives on the Victorian coast, the setting for A Body of Water (1990) and The Seal Woman (1992). Her latest book is Collected Stories (1996) and her latest passion, black-and-white photography. Beverley also had a story included in The Gift of Story (1998), a collection of short stories demonstrating the range of talented Australian short story writers published by UQP.
