The Last Dance And Other Stories

Ten short stories by Victoria Hislop move between the streets of Athens and the tree-lined squares of Greek villages. Each one is built around its own place and atmosphere, so the collection reads as a series of separate visits rather than one continuous narrative.

The characters are varied. A lonesome priest, a pair of battling brothers and an unwanted stranger each get a story, and so does a groom troubled by music and memory. Every figure is drawn with care, and each tale gives its own person room to be seen.

Love and loyalty run through the book, along with separation and reconciliation. The tone is bittersweet, and the stories are short enough to read one at a time, in any order, or all together over a few evenings.

Three of the ten first appeared in the ebook collection One Cretan Evening. This edition gathers them with seven others in a single Demy-format hardback. Readers who know Hislop's novels The Island, The Return and The Thread will recognise her Greek settings here in a shorter form. Whether the people in these stories find their way back to one another is the question that carries from page to page.