The Angel’s Share: A Cretan Grape Harvest

As winter Covid cases surge, why not escape with me to a grape harvest in sunny Crete, home to Zeus, Aphrodite and the angels who share in every barrel of fermenting wine?

Earth, sky, rocks and sea fill my creative reserves when I am in Crete. Often, when the moon is laying its silvery path across a silent Lybian Sea at 4:30 am the Muses whip me. Now, holed up in white, disease-heavy Canada, I am working on The Angel’s Share, my new heist novel about sex and love, grapes and wine, and a $2 million bottle of cognac. Did the angels send me Anna Maria Kambourakis, a wonderful sommelier, owner of Chania Wine Tours, and writer of unravelingwine.com? She and her husband Vasilis Kokologiannakis came into my life last year when I was researching The Angel’s Share. Now Anna Maria has sent me this description and pictures of her family’s wine harvest in October. Reading it will lift your spirits, I promise!

On October 1st we harvested our Romeiko vineyards here in Crete, 75 years after Vasili’s grandfather planted the vines in 1945. The vineyards were the Kokologiannakis family’s main source for wine until 1973 

when Vasili’s father left for the United States. With no one left behind to care for the vineyards, the vines grew out of control. When Vasili arrived in Crete in 2013, the vines were unmanageable and were desperate for care. Vasili revitalized the vineyards by pruning and creating support systems for vines that had fallen over. 

This growing season was quite difficult. Hornets were eating all the grapes! Vasili set up traps around the vineyard in hopes of saving the crop. There were thousands and thousands of hornets in the traps every time he replaced them. We operate Chania Wine Tours but this year, thanks to the pandemic, the tourism season came to a standstill. The silver lining to this was that Vasili had the time to properly care for his vineyards. 

Harvesting in Crete is a family affair. Close friends and relatives are invited to participate. We borrowed baskets from our neighbor, Antonis, and borrowed the crusher/destemmer from our son’s godfather, Nikos. Wine equipment is expensive and everyone borrows what they need from other people in the village.

Everyone grabbed their shears and headed up the hill behind the family home to the small vineyard of Romeiko. The grapes were perfect! Very few bunches had been eaten by the hornets. Because of the care Vasili gave the vineyard by pruning and stabilizing the vines correctly, the grapes were easily accessible and easy to harvest. 

Romeiko is the most widely planted grape of western Crete. It is a red grape though many of the bunches never turn purple. Farmers need to be careful that the grapes don’t get too ripe because Romeiko can get quite high in alcohol. Our grapes were harvested at 14% potential alcohol. Harvesting the small vineyard took less than an hour with all the great helpers we had. We brought in over one ton of grapes!!! That’s enough to make 2 barrels of wine.

The truck was filled with all the baskets of grapes and brought down to the garage for crushing and destemming. Our friend, Bobby, emptied the baskets into the machine. Crushing the grapes releases the sweet juice from the inside of the grape to begin fermentation in the plastic bin below. The destemmer is supposed to remove the stems but the machine we borrowed is quite old and did a pretty bad job of it. That’s okay with Romeiko because the stems add a bit of tannin to the wine for much needed structure and ageing ability. 

Back at the house, Vasili’s mom and I were busy cooking up a feast for everyone who came to help. (Masks are not necessary outdoors here because Crete’s Covid numbers are very low.) We served lamb with rice, salads, stuffed zucchini flowers, tzatziki, green beans, and handcut french fries for the kids. Vasili’s father was grilling pork chops and chicken wings on the barbeque all night. Of course, pitchers and pitchers of last years’ wine was served to our wonderful guests. Drinking and eating lasted throughout the night. 

Vasili heads up to the village every other day to check on the status of this year’s wine. It is bubbling along and will complete the fermentation process in the next couple of days. Vasili is thrilled with the results so far. 2020 is one of the best vintages yet for us!

After the first 5 days the wine was pressed away from the skins and put into barrels to continue fermentation. The wine will stay in the barrels until spring when it will be transferred to another barrel to separate it from the sediment that will fall to the bottom. It’ll stay in that new barrel until we drink it all! The skins are not wasted. They’ll be used in the next few weeks to make raki. Raki is the famous Cretan moonshine. The moonshine party is another great feast! 

Thank you, Anna Maria!

By the way, Anna Maria and Vasili are adventurers worthy of their own blog story. Read more about them here

Giannou, Crete, Greece

Greek Gifts

Greek gifts have enriched the world for several thousand years, most recently last week.

Fira, Santorini

Fira, Santorini

Greece’s myths show us how different kinds of human energy play out. Zeus, king of gods, is a rapist and wielder of thunderbolts who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. His power must be tempered by his brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, wife and lovers.

Today, as Cretan jewelry designer Carola Poppinga reminds us on Facebook, Zeus has taken the form of a bank. But delinquent Greece, in trying to stand up to the European Central Bank and to Germany, its major backer, has brought several glimmers of soul into fiscal equations that lack any humanity.

Carol's Workshop, Mirthios, Crete

Carol’s Workshop, Mirthios, Crete

French Socialist Party chief Jean-Christophe Cambadelis wrote a letter to Germany this week asking how it can insist on such crippling austerity in Greece after the help Germany received following World War II.

“Has your country forgotten the support France gave right after all the atrocious crimes committed in your name?” he wrote.

When I was researching my novel, Cally’s Way, which is set in Crete, I learned about Germany’s deceitful World War II propaganda, the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in Greece, and the brave ingenuity of the Crete’s threadbare Resistance. Sixty years later, as German tourists flocked to the island, an aged Cretan Resistance fighter told me:

“Those (WWII) Germans were not these Germans.”

A BBC video filmed this week on German streets confirms this. Every citizen canvassed says Europe is a community now and “we must all help each other.”

Meanwhile Denmark, not a Eurozone member, is offering money to help the Greeks through this crisis: an act of unparalleled generosity.

Greece is in the fiscal doghouse because of corruption and tax evasion. A reason — not an excuse — for this might be that this nation has spent the last several hundred years under the rule of foreign tyrants: Venetians, Turks, Germans. Corruption and underground economies probably flourished.

Fiscal irresponsibility exists everywhere. International banking made this clear after the markets crashed in 2008. Multinational corporations move their operations and accounts all over the world to avoid paying taxes.

Greece, Crete, coast

Skinaria, Crete

On the up side of the ledger, what do the Greek people give us?

* Passion and animation born on ancient, sun bleached coasts.
* Fellowship and generosity unequaled anywhere else in the world.
* A long history of strength, endurance and resourcefulness in the face of hardship.
Also:
* The Mediterranean diet’s appreciation of healthy, delicious home-harvested foods.
* Wine and Cretan raki, a liqueur offered anywhere anytime to passing visitors.

Bank, corporate and parliamentary boardrooms all over Europe could benefit from these qualities.

Efcharistó Greece, (thank you) for stirring some of them to life!

Sheep in the Cretan mountains

Sheep in the Cretan mountains

Coloured Moser crystal glasses wildlife etchings Prague Czech Republic

Prague Diary (2) – Creative Beauty & the Beast

Beauty

This Prague diary is about my trip to research my new historical novel. I am looking for the Communism Museum. Mild multiple sclerosis requires me to use walking poles and I am concentrating on planting my feet squarely on the cobblestones when suddenly a sense of familiarity envelops me.

‘Moser,’ says my brain. I look up and there it is: Moser’s crystal gallery, a place where stunning beauty has a practical purpose.

Moser crystal gallery Prague history

Table in Moser crystal gallery Prague Czech Republic

When I lived here, during a gap year between high school and university one of my jobs, as daughter of the Canadian ambassador, was to take visiting Canadian dignitaries to see Prague’s sights. Moser was a favorite stop.

Forty-six years later, in the same ornately paneled rooms, white plaster Cupids still look down from the ceiling at sculptures and vases, at eggshell thin goblets embossed with gold. Tumblers are luminous yellow, amber, rust, mauve, aquamarine, black. Scenes — a pheasant taking flight, a quail ruffing its feathers, an antlered deer in the forest — are etched into some of them.

Mosesr tumbler PRzgue Czech Republic

Duck etched on Moser tumbler Prague Czech Republic

And look, here is Moser’s signature collection of stemware, each glass with its own distinctive shape and personality: one with a round bowl and short stem, another tall and thin, another shallow, open, each one designed to best deliver a different kind of aperitif or wine or liqueur.

Here is the table where seventeen-year old me was taught to hold stemmed goblets at the base, with thumb and forefinger at a 45-degree angle, so the heat of my hand would not disturb the glass’ contents.

 

Moser stemware Prague Czech Republic

Miniature Moser stemware collection

The Beast

Observing my limp and walking poles, a saleslady approaches. She introduces me to a portrait of Ludwig Moser that I do not remember. A

Moser crystal gallery Prague history

Table in Moser crystal gallery Prague Czech Republic

19th Century engraver, he created his unique lead-free crystal, then set up a factory in Karlovy Vary, not far from Prague. When the Austro-Hungarian emperor and England’s King Edward VII bought his crystal ware, it became famous across Europe. Ludwig’s son Leo took over the business but, because they were Jewish, the family was forced to sell the company and leave the country in 1934.

The Beauty And The Beast fairytale comes in a variety of forms, but in this true story, the Nazi beast was annihilated by a second beast. Czechoslovakia’s Communist government was trading on Moser’s name when I lived in Prague, using his creations to bring badly needed hard currency into the country. At the Karlovy Vary factory I saw artists in uniform brown aprons etching the beautiful scenes.

Now, home from my trip, I park my poles and think about beasts, how they can be political, economic, social or physical. Always they force us into futures we would not have chosen. But always, too, beauty endures, and nurtures us.

Today, Moser’s creative beauty is alive and well all over the world. In Canada, lights in my dining room corner cabinet shine through the coloured crystal glasses I have inherited. Their beauty and their message thrill me every time I look at them.

Moser colored crystal Prague Czech republic

Colored Moser crystal glasses in my cabinet

Moser fish sculpture crystal Prague Czech Republic

Moser fish sculpture

Travelling in Crete – The Food!

One morning, while I was writing Cally’s Way on my mountainside terrace, an old woman wearing a kerchief stopped by on her way to the steep vacant lot next door, where herbs and artichokes grow in profusion. Pulling a sprig of fennel out of a cloth pouch attached to her apron, she smiled.
“Very good with potatoes.” 

DSC01241


I watched her spend the next half hour climbing, bending, squatting, reaching and twisting as she filled her bag with fresh greenery before walking back up the mountainside to prepare dinner. She is well into her eighties, a typical Cretan grandma.

Artichokes merit their own trip to the vacant lot. Cretans put them in casseroles but I can’t wait that long. Boil, then strip and dip is my method. The impossibly lush heart of this tough and prickly mountain plant needs only lemon juice or salted and peppered olive oil.

An artichoke from next door

At the bottom of the mountain fishermen bring their daily catches to the Plakias fish shop. You can eat fresh sea bream, sardines and other lovely fish, or squid, sometimes cuttlefish.  Or, why not buy a newspaper cornet of shrimps? Poached for a couple of minutes, they still hold the flavour of the sea. 

Local lettuce, tomatoes, onions, or a bag of horta (a mixture of greens) and a bottle of local Cretan olive oil are available anywhere. Add a $6-bottle of wine from Sitia, on Crete’s north coast, and Presto, you have one of the tastiest, healthiest, most economical dinners in the world!

Cuttlefish stew – Yum!

Then there is the meat. Lambs gambol about on the mountainsides, and a few days before Easter shotgun blasts make clear the connection between raising and eating animals. Roasting lamb on an outdoor spit is a Greek tradition that goes back thousands of years.

Why is lamb on a spit so good, I asked my friend Nikos, who ran Nikos Souvlaki in Plakias for many years.


“Because, where was this lamb three weeks ago? Out on the mountainside eating oregano, thyme, rosemary!”  (Those who have read my new novel, Cally’s Way, will recognise this interchange.)


One of the best places to find this meal is at Le Vieux Moulin Taverna in the inland town of Agyroupoli. 


If you want a gastronomic treat and have a few extra Euros, drive up to Milia, high in the western White Mountains. A 16th Century village, Milia was built as a summer pasturing place and then abandoned until World War II, when it  served as a hiding place for its families during the Germans’ brutal occupation of Crete. After the war it was abandoned again until two of its owner families rebuilt the village as a totally organic, locally sustainable mountain resort. A two-minute video here will give you a tour.

Milia in spring, from a hiking trail

Milia features in my novel Cally’s Way. How could it not, when the book intertwines the story of Cally, a young woman trying to find a way to make a life in a world that promises very little security, with that of her grandmother Callisto, a runner in the Cretan Resistance, who lived in a high mountain village? A story summary and reviews are here. Read a sample chapter here (click on cover.)

And happy eating, wherever you are!

Why not share your experiences by commenting below?
Thanks for visiting,
Jane

Travelling in Crete – The World War II Story

Crete’s World War II story interests readers of Cally’s Way because it is told from the point of view of women. 

Buy HERE or HERE  

On May 20, 1941, when hundreds of German paratroopers floated down out of Crete’s blue morning sky in the Second World War’s first airborne invasion, most of the island’s men were away fighting with the Greek army on the mainland. Only a few thousand Allied troops from Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and the local people were there to defend Crete. Grandfathers fought with ancient swords left over from the Turkish wars, grandmothers with pitchforks. Women hoisted rifles, manned machine guns. 

Knives and dishes used in WWII. Plates have swastika on bottom.

Twelve days later the swastika was flying in Crete but, situated in the eastern Mediterranean, south of Europe, north of Africa, just west of the Middle East, this island has been invaded again and again for more than two thousand years. Even its monks were militant resistance fighters. 

Callisto in Cally’s Way is fictitious, but the hair raising submarine rescues at Limni Beach, just below Preveli Monastery, really happened. And so did so much else in the book. Teenaged boys and girls became messengers, nurses, hiding and helping Allied soldiers who were trapped on the island. When they were caught, whole villages suffered gruesome reprisals.

Limni Beach from cliff top.

Unsung Cretan WWII heroes must include the girl who carried food past German patrols to two Australians hiding in the Koutaliotis Gorge, and the girl who rowed a British soldier fifty miles out to Gavdos, an uninhabited island off the coast. Machine gun fire, strafing the boat from the air, opened the soldier’s side. The girl made him lie in the sea water flooding into the boat, to stop the bleeding and keep the wound clean.

Seventy three years later, travelling in Crete, you’ll find old ladies dressed in black out on the mountainsides, filling pouches attached to their aprons with horta, edible greens. They were there; they remember.


You’ll also find busloads of German tourists hiking, swimming, frequenting the tavernas, bringing badly needed Euros into the Cretan economy. How do the Cretans feel about this?


The elderly curator of Sougia’s war museum, who fought as a teenager, smiled when I asked him:


“Those Germans are not these Germans.”  

Pragmatic #forgiveness: what an example for so many parts of the world right now!

Tell me what you think. Comment below, or on FB at Jane Bow’s Novels, or on Twitter @JaneBow2
Thanks for visiting me here,
Jane

Travelling in Crete: a novelist’s thoughts (1)

One of the reasons it takes 12 years to write a novel (Cally’s Way) is that you fall in love with the place where it is set, in my case Crete. If you travel there this summer, go off the beaten track. And prepare to come back changed.

Crete’s south coast, a land of myth and history

The first time I went to Crete, in 2001, I knew nothing, except that:
a) it is the southernmost Greek island and therefore, hopefully, was warm in March, and
b) it was home to the peaceful pre-Greek Minoan culture that worshipped the Great Goddess and produced world renown statues of her, alabaster pottery and gold jewellery.  

My teenaged daughter and I rented a mountainside apartment overlooking the sea in Myrthios, away from tourist resorts along the main, north coast highway. In the mornings I holed up in the kitchen, meditating then making notes on what I was reading, thinking, seeing, feeling, with no idea why. 

My daughter sat on the balcony working on her correspondence courses or reading The Cretan Runner, a page-turner of a war memoir by George Psychoundakis, who was a shepherd until World War II, when hundreds of German paratroopers floated down out of the sky. During their brutal occupation of the island, the Cretans mounted a powerful, imaginative Resistance, working with British commandos hiding in the mountains.  

In the afternoons we drove our tiny Fiat up hair-raising, unguard-railed mountain roads, looking for the villages Psychoundakis described, imagining the stories he told of unnamed, unknown heroes, some of them boys and girls.

Sometimes we explored ruined Minoan palaces. King Minos (who owned the mythical Minotaur) built his famous palace at Knossos, but it‘s always clogged with tourist buses. I much prefer Phaistos, near the south coast, where the first linear writing was discovered on the Phaistos disk. It is so easy to imagine the famous bull jumping spectacles there, in a stone courtyard still clearly preserved 4,000 years later.

The ancient stone block archive at Phaistos

If the day was hot, we explored beaches along the south coast, swimming in the Libyan Sea beside the 14th Century Venetian fort at Frangocostello, or at Skinaria, a beach tucked away behind the headlands that nudists (now prohibited) favoured, or at fabulous, palm studded Preveli, once known as Limni Beach, where two daring submarine rescues of Allied troops took place. (See Cally’s Way.)

Preveli beach from the headland above.

I spoke no Greek but for some reason, smelling the sea air and the herbs on the mountainsides, watching the clouds over Plakias Bay, listening to the staccato rise and fall of the language in the villages, nodding hello to black-clad women of my age with whom I had nothing in common, I felt utterly, viscerally at home. 

Why? Was it because my formative years were spent in Spain, at the other end of the Mediterranean? 
Too thin a reason, by itself.

Was it because the Greek myths, many of which were born on this island, and the Greek language lie at the root of our Western civilization? Psychology, archeology, logic, democracy — so many of our fundamental social concepts are defined by Greek words. 
No. If this was the reason, why doesn’t every English speaking Western tourist feel at home here?

An ancient olive tree lives on the mountainside

Was it something less nameable then? Something to do with genetic predisposition or re-incarnation? 
Hard to conjure that, but when I was a child in Spain my father used to take me to look at the paintings in Madrid’s Prado. My favourite artist, at age nine, was El Greco. Not until I went to Crete did I find out that El Greco was Cretan. 

Life itself is a miracle, so who knows what the full answer is. What I do know is that:
a) the great power of love features in all my novels,
b) I love this island, its people, its rock, its air, its sea, and
c) love and creativity are two faces of the same force. 

Flowers in a Cretan ditch

One morning, that first year in Crete, the World War II part of Cally’s Way dropped into my head fully formed. I have been returning to the island to write every year since then. 

And now, published this spring, the book’s characters have come to life in the very place where they were born! Tourists from all over Europe can find Cally’s Way at Carol’s Workshop in Myrthios. Happy me!

Cally’s Way now on sale at Carol’s Workshop.

What makes a place feel like home? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment below, or on Facebook at Jane Bow’s Novels, or on Twitter @JaneBow2.

Thanks for visiting me here,
Jane

Decisions Are Rocks

Once we make major life decisions, they become solid, like the ground, or a mountain, creating the contours, peaks and valleys of our lives. When I chose the man with whom I am spending my life, I gave my future a unique and distinct shape.  A different choice would have made a different life.

I’m thinking about decisions and rock because my new novel, Cally’s Way, is about how both shaped so many lives seventy years ago in Crete, during World War II. The Cretan people had a harsh choice to make: to use courage, strength and guile to resist the German occupation, or to collaborate. Click here to sample their landscape in the Kourtaliotis Gorge.

Monument to Cretan Resistance.

  
Meanwhile we have just returned to Canada from Crete, driving from Toronto’s airport to Peterborough, Ontario on a concrete highway, eight lanes congested with cars and trucks, the air tinged pink by smog.

“I know,” a bright light in the highway department must once have decided, “let’s buy prime farmland along Lake Ontario, chop down the woods, reroute streams, and cover it all with concrete.”

A highway department decision-maker

Concrete high rises, some new, others shabby with age, line the route.

Decisions like these are the bedrock of seedy, soul destroying landscapes all across America. But, wanting to move more and more stuff, to endlessly grow our economies, we keep on making them. Here in Peterborough (a place that has not grown since we came here in 1979,) City Council has just decided to build a bridge right through one of Canada’s most beautiful city parks, in the name of hoped-for progress. 

Rights to rip open the ground for mines, to destroy virgin forests for wood, to pollute whole watersheds and  ecosystems to get oil out of Alberta’s tar sands and move it to markets are being granted all across Canada. Decisions that render us uglier, sicker and poorer. Different choices would make a different future.

Once made, changing big decisions leaves scars. Divorcees hurt, their children suffer. Landscapes cry. Look at Detroit, riddled with crumbling freeways, boarded up houses, decaying high rises full of broken windows.

And yet. In Detroit homies cruise outside a corner liquor store while inside the proprietor is full of humor, toughness, generosity. Down at the bus station, outside the locked gate in the wee hours, the old boys at the taxi stand are trading jokes, the air full of laughter. Hurt people are resilient, capable of new decisions, strong growth. Nature can recover.

Bird of Paradise in Myrthios, Crete


Could it be then that hope can only come from the decisions we individuals make, moment to moment? 

Take the hours I spend on Facebook, Twitter and other electronic devices. These disconnect me from the life flowing around me, while making me so intense! And disconnected, distracted or fractured attention spans are easily manipulated. 

I can, however, also make choices during my day to restore balance, create harmony and connection. All I need is to do it. Because in the end my father, who fought in World War II to preserve our rights to freedom of choice in thought, expression and action, had it right:

“Make your own decisions,” he said, “because if you don’t, life will make them for you.” 

Sometimes, like Cally in my novel, we need history to slap us into wakefulness, snap us out of the complacency that can lose us everything, before it’s too late.

Available in print & ebook at Iguana Books, Amazon, Chapters & all other retailers

Mothers And Daughters

Mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, is there a bond more powerful? More influential? Full of hitches and glitches, joy, pain and confusion, a mother’s love gives shape to her child’s life. Protecting, nourishing, nurturing a new little human, is there a greater challenge, or gift? 

Every mother is her mother’s child, however, and Mother Mary is the only saint I know of who had a kid. Action and reaction, the messy, muddled motherhood continuum goes on and on, creating through its tapestry of trial and error the flawed, unique beauty that is every living soul. 

New life in the Cretan countryside

Cally’s Way, my new novel set in Crete, is all about the mother-daughter bond, and the fact that, through it, historical horrors create our identities whether we know about them or not. When the novel opens, 25-year old Cally knows very little about her mother, who has just died. Here is her first encounter with the enduring power of motherhood:

“Apparently no one in Crete wore motorcycle helmets. She hugged Oliver’s back, watching over his shoulder as he gunned the engine up the mountain road, twisting around hairpin bends, the bike’s headlight cutting a swath through the darkness, higher and higher… the sea now thousands of feet below… They crested a steep hillock on the edge of the village of Sellia. There was a church at the top.


A great palm tree stood guard over a wrought iron gate. Inside, waist-high marble tombs decorated with crosses, angels, doves were lit by oil lamps in glassed-in shrines at their heads: rows and rows of tiny lights flickering under the moon and stars. Cypress trees at the top of each row, sculpted nearly horizontal by the mountain winds, looked like Japanese ink drawings against the sky. She had never seen anything like it.


“Cretans like to build their graveyards as close as possible to God,” said Oliver.


Beside the oil lamps inside the shrines, people had placed a few flowers, some fresh, others plastic, and a crucifix or a prized medal or a candlestick or a toy. Always a photograph, several in ornate silver frames… 

Something squeaked in the darkness above her… There it was again, a single squeak in the trees. A bat? Strangely, she felt no fear. Death, all around her, was beautiful in this nighttime world of flickering souls and answering stars. Removed from light, bright day life, the departed connected with eternity, and were free to come alive. To be with you.”
 

A Cretan grave


On Mothers’ Day this Sunday I would like to celebrate every mother because, no matter who or where she is, she is doing the best she can with what she’s got in every moment. 

Also, this year please help me send loving energy to the 234 mothers and daughters caught up in Nigeria’s latest kidnapping horror. 

A summary & reviews are here; you can buy it here or here.  


Cally’s Way Honoured by Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus‘ editors have chosen to feature the Cally’s Way review in April’s Kirkus Review!  

Buy it by clicking on Amazon, Chapters or Iguana Books  
Set in Crete, Cally’s Way is a self-discovery adventure about sex and love and loss, mothers and daughters, and the way historical horrors shape our identities whether we know about them or not. Kirkus’ review calls the novel “accomplished and lyrical,” and “romantic,” but also “tough-minded” and “harrowing,” addressing “important questions like whether it’s possible to avoid being implicated in the modern world’s sins.”

Cally’s Way interweaves the 2002 story of Cally, a 25-year old business graduate, with the World War II story of Callisto, her grandmother, who was a runner in the Cretan Resistance.  

Cally’s mother was born on Crete but has always refused to talk about it. Now she has died, leaving one instruction: that before she starts her first job, Cally should visit her mother’s homeland. 

On Crete’s south coast she meets Oliver, a reticent, very attractive U.S. Army deserter, and a night of love awakens feelings Cally has never known. Then, waiting for her plane in Athens airport, she learns from a television that the company she is about to work for is killing people with water pollution. These two events demolish Cally’s fragile equilibrium, setting her on a new, uncharted path, back in Crete, that strips her of even her clothes. It also takes her deep into the mountains on a motorcycle, and into the history of Crete’s brutal Nazi occupation, before leading to deep love, a horrific family discovery, and a future she never would have imagined.

Preveli Valley ruin where escaping Allied soldiers hid

Cally’s Way is also about the ancient beauty of Crete, where “Aphrodite, ruthless as ebony, old as art, danced a whole sequence of choices above the morning waves.” 

Bestselling British author Hilary Boyd, who reviewed Cally’s Way, likes “the scent of wild thyme on the Cretan hills, the taste of a freshly picked orange, the sweetness of golden honey. Cally, like us, is seduced by it all… but at the same time… we are held in suspense by the island’s cruel past.”

Early oleander buds near Cally’s cave
“One of the most striking aspects of Cally’s Way is how the horrors of war have been contextualized within the framework of  day-to-day existence,” writes Rethymnon Bugle editor Kate Brusten. “The questions posed by Cally’s journey of self-discovery are ones any reader will be able to connect with. This book is highly recommended.”
“Cally’s Way resonates deeply, with surprising connections among the violent and tragic occupations of the Second World War, post-war Communist paranoia and our current occupations and insurgencies,” writes Robert Begiebing, award-winning novelist, Norman Mailer Center mentor and Professor of English Emeritus of Southern New Hampshire University, who also reviewed the novel.A satisfying and revelatory read.”
 

The Dragon’s Head in Plakias Bay

You can read the first chapter here
To see the full reviews, click here

You’ll find Cally’s Way at any online retailer (see links above, under cover photo.) Chapters in Peterborough, Ontario, has the book in stock.

If you enjoy Cally’s Way, why not help spread the word by posting a sentence or two about it on Amazon or Goodreads, or right here? 
Thanks for your visit,

Jane
 


Watch Out, Oak Island Treasure Hunters!

Beware, Marty and Rick Lagina, Oak Island treasure hunting brothers from Michigan! Brigit has just escaped from The Oak Island Affair and she’s sailing towards you. 

Brigit: Hi guys. Remember your first starry-eyed,     wet-behind-the-ears summer on Oak Island? I was there. Me and Vanessa sailed right into Joudrey’s Cove. Not that you noticed, being tied up in meetings, deciding when and where to sink yet another fortune into this tiny Nova Scotia island.

Oak Island. White structure is major dig site, Borehole 10X

Brigit:  We walked the beach–

Me: Shsh, Brigit!
 

Brigit: No! Damn it Jane, six people have already died on Oak Island, and you know what happened to Vanessa down that sinkhole. What nearly happened to me. Do you think the Michigan brothers’ new History Channel series is going to talk about that? 

One of many shafts leading deep into the island’s heart.
Me: What happened to you was your own fault, Brigit. And why should the Lagina brothers care? You know the Oak Island history, how team after team of men, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, have been pouring millions into the search for gold ever since 1795, because clearly something lies hidden–

Brigit: Beyond the reach of greed! If they would just talk to Vanessa–! 
 

Me: Talk to a character in a book? Yeah, right.
 

Brigit: Why not? Fiction is all about the real truths, isn’t it? And obviously they talk to their dreams. So what’s the difference? 

Me: Hmmm. 😀

New print or ebook here or here.

 Want to talk to Brigit while she’s here? Send her a comment, and thanks for visiting!
Jane