1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled queen and king of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen; his dazzling wife, Marianne Ihlen; and the young Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.

Into their midst arrives Erica, a teenager with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.

Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost, and about the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.

Polly Samson