HOT NEWS: here is something really new from Lefkada Trails – a novel written by Colin Cooper. If you want to understand the recent history of Alexandros and the mountain villages, here is the novel that will explain.
On sale now on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle ebook.
“So movingly real and so convincingly speaks the truth for itself and for history. How someone — let alone an Englishman — entered so naturally, deeply and unpretentiously into the psyche of a place and a people is an achievement.” — Christos Pittas, composer, resident of Alexandros, Lefkada.
Lefkada, Greece. August 1935. A grandmother presses a school notebook into her granddaughter’s hands at the village panegyri and says: write what you see. Someone should remember.
What Maroula sees, over the next thirteen years, is the Italian occupation, the arrests, the famine, the resistance forming in the mountains above the village — and then something worse than any of it. Neighbours turning on neighbours in a conflict that on this island began before the rest of Greece fell into Civil War. She writes it all down. Then she hides the diary in the wall of the family house, takes the ferry to Athens, and never comes back.
Seventy years later, before she dies, she asks her granddaughter Io back to the house to retrieve the diary. She adds, “you decide.” Behind a stone that moves, Io finds the notebook. What it contains has never been safe to know.
The novel is told entirely through women’s voices — their waiting, their witnessing, their silence, and their survival. The experience of conflict and civil war as women lived it, not as history recorded it.
If you have walked through the mountain villages of Lefkada’s interior and wondered why so many houses stand empty, their doors sealed, their terraces returning to scrub — this novel is the answer. It is the story of what happened to the people who built those houses, farmed those terraces, and played music in those squares. Told through the diary of a fictional girl and her family — but every event she witnesses is documented, every place she walks is real. Hidden for seventy years. Still not entirely safe to tell.
If you have enjoyed the novels of Victoria Hislop or Sofka Zinovieff, this novel is for you.