From Sara Alexi, one of Amazon.co.uk's top literary fiction writers comes this empowering addition to her Greek Village Collection ...
Abby, 17, storms out of the house and boards a flight to Greece, but gets hopelessly lost and ends up in the wrong village.
Alone, with very little money, no Greek and no way to contact her friend Jackie, who has lined up a bar job for her, Abby finds she has to stand on her own two feet for the first time…
She meets Stella, who runs the local ouzeri - a rough and ready eatery were farmers gather to drink and take refuge from their domestic lives.
Stella does not need a naive young English girl hanging around, and the ouzeri is not the glamorous bar that Abby had bargained for.
But when events throw them together, the situation brings to the boil tensions that have been brewing for years, the ripples drawing in other people in the village, threatening Abby's ability to ever leave, culminating in shocking unforeseen events and the uncovering of dark secrets that change peoples' thinking about themselves and others permanently.
Why I Wrote this Book - Sara Alexi
An abusive relationship doesn't seem like the jolliest of topic for a novel and yet times of hardship can bring out the strength in people and cement the most unlikely of friendships.
This story is about Stella as she struggles to decide whether she can leave her domineering bully of a husband, Stavros, and if so, how.
As with all the books I have write, I am interested in understanding the psychology that draws people into choosing what often does not look like the most rational route.
When women stay in abusive relationships we wonder why they on earth they remain with men who clearly do not appreciate or care for them. The reasons are complex of course, and may include social pressures, feelings of failure, and other factors, and each situation is unique, although it seems that there are often parallels between different cases.
I have witnessed more than once when I was practising as a psychotherapist – a woman might stay in a toxic or abusive relationship as long as she is the only one being mistreated, but if the abuse begins to affect her children, for example, she might make the decision to leave.
This behaviour calls into question the value that a woman (or a man, as of course not all abusive relationships involve the woman being abused) places on her own comfort compared to that of others, and I believe it is this lack of self worth that might be the key in many relationships.
Stella, our heroine, was teased at school because her mother was a gypsy, and she would doubtless have grown up believing that there was something wrong with her heritage. I use her gypsy descent almost as a metaphor for lack of self worth to clearly show how the abuser can hold leverage over the abused without taking any clear action; how the abuser can get 'inside' the victim's mind.
But I have tried to push it even further forward by taking Stella to the point where she almost transcends everything she has been led to believe and develops a stronger sense of self, emerging with her own identity that doesn't need to rely on labels such as 'Gypsy' or 'Greek'.
I don't know if I have managed to put this message across skillfully in the book as I got very involved in all the fun she and her friends had along the way. For a tough topic a lot of humour and adventures seemed to naturally become added to the mix. I hope you enjoy the ride.
If you like Gerald Durrell you'll love Sara Alexi!
