Foreign rights

The fragrance of the  tamarisks was everywhere, the foliage of spring was riotous, the boukvamvilias and the hibiscus bushes, crimson and golden streaks of lightening, the sea perfectly translucent, pale blue all the way out, half on the earth and half in  the sky, water and ether indistinguishable. If Maro was with Kyriakos, they would share their favourite phrase:  «How much better can it get in heaven?» But, instead, she is with this man with whom they’ve only spent a few weeks together, at irregular intervals at that (a bit like the lightening streaks of the boukamvilia)  but who, nevertheless,  keeps exciting her, upsetting her, blowing to smithereens the order that she has struggled so hard to reinstate in her life.

Personalities who are demanding and unquiet,  characters suspended between conflicting desires, the book’s heroes select, on top of everything else, the wrong partners. Out of self-indulgence, in one case, or out of superficiality, youthful exuberance, resentment or vengefulness, they cross with relative ease the demarcating line between love and its opposite, truth and lies, faithfulness and betrayal. And when the moment of judgement arrives,  who can tell with certainty whether it has been precipitated by the craftiness of love, the fickleness of fate or the shackles with which they have willingly bound themselves?