The history of the novel was interesting, but it really dragged on and on in the last quarter of the book as there was no climactic scene like in The Island. On the face of it, the novel was fine but there were just too many problems with it for me to give it more than two stars. For a start all the characters were either good or bad, selfish or selfless. The poor were wonderful people with tonnes of friends and the rich only cared about money and were ultimately miserable and alone. I realise the Moreno family was an exception to this, but they still chose to live in the poorest part of the city and were therefore wonderful.

There was, in effect, a “pacto de olvido”, a pact of forgetting,” says Hislop, when we meet over morning coffee in the cafe of a Tunbridge Wells department store – the Hislops and their children live in the nearby village of Sissinghurst. She’s on her way to a book signing, otherwise we would have met at the family home. A wattle-and-daub house, it is 500-years-old and apparently, it’s a miracle it’s still standing. Thessaloniki, 1917. As Dimitri Komninos is born, a fire sweeps through the thriving multicultural city, where Christians, Jews and Moslems live side by side. It is the first of many catastrophic events that will change for ever this city, as war, fear and persecution begin to divide its people. Five years later, young Katerina escapes to Greece when her home in Asia Minor is destroyed by the Turkish army. Losing her mother in the chaos, she finds herself on a boat to an unknown destination. From that day the lives of Dimitri and Katerina become entwined, with each other and with the story of the city itself. If you enjoy novels that also give you a potted history and immerse you in local culture you’ll probably enjoy this one. I did find it odd that the prologue reveals who the main character will end up with. Because Miguel's account follows the disparate fortunes of the entire family, Hislop is able to dramatise many different aspects of the war. Granada itself is a crucible of conflict, claiming several Ramirez victims. The eldest brother, Antonio, fights for the Republic in Madrid and Barcelona. Mercedes sets out for Malaga to find Javier just as it's razed to the ground by Franco's foreign allies. She joins the lines of escaping survivors, eventually travelling to Bilbao and beyond in her increasingly desperate search. The descriptions of war-ravaged Spain, of hand-to-hand fighting, bombardment of civilians, brutal atrocities by both sides and Europe's cold reception of refugees are very powerful. Carefully stirring her coffee, she notes that many people who fought on the Left were unable to publish anything about it. Now, almost 70 years since the civil war ended, that pact has finally been broken. And that, believes Hislop, is a cause for celebration, despite the revisionist historians on the Right who still insist that the repression of the Left is a myth. “Many people have not told of course, people like my friend clearly still have secrets they do not wish to reveal.”The plot develops without leaving any emotional mark, through very unlikely situations (e.g. a mother who NEVER bothers to go and visit her lost daughter, a father who NEVER shows any sign of compassion toward his son, a murder by bad diet, come on) and it is pretty much devoid of soul as, I suppose, the author doesn't have any intimate knowledge of Greece, of his people, of his history or the imagination to make up for it. I hadn't realized that there was such an enormous flow of Greeks and Turks after WWI, forcibly ejected from places they had spent previous centuries living in peace. The author did a great job portraying the harmony of mixed-ethnicity (Greek, Jewish, Muslim) neighborhoods in Greece before the war. I learned a lot about the turmoil Greece faced both during WWII and afterwards, with collaborationists helping the Nazis, and Communists fighting for control. Visiting Greece in the '80s and afterwards, one would have no idea that the country had survived so much recent violence and turbulence. Este terceiro livro que li de Victoria Hislop, a seguir aos livros da mesma autora,"A Ilha" e "O Regresso", fez-me "mergulhar" na história de Tessalonica e também da Grécia no decurso do século XX, entre 1917 (ano em que um incêndio destrói grande parte daquela cidade) e o terramoto do dia 20 de junho de 1978, que também afetou a mesma cidade, com as suas consequências devastadoras.

However, as I said, I absolutely adored it. It was a bit slow to get going but after a little while I was completely hooked and couldn't put it down.

Dimitri Komninos is born in Thessaloniki in 1917, the year that an inferno ravaged the multicultural city.