‘One August Night’ by Victoria Hislop

Some fifteen years after she published ‘The Island’, Victoria Hislop returned to the same setting and wrote this kind-of sequel. It focuses, in the main, on the contrasting fates of two relatively minor characters from her original book – the cousins Andreas and Manolis Vandoulakis – but we also find out more about Maria Petrakis too.

This story starts at the point in 1957 (towards the end of the story in ‘The Island’) when a murder occurs in a village on Crete, and is thus not concerned directly with the inhabitants leper colony of Spinalonga which made the first book so compelling and memorable. This is a more conventional tale about the aftermath of a murder, its impact on a family, and the respective fates of the murderer and the man whose actions led to this terrible crime of passion taking place.

The sequel is not written with quite the same level of passion as the original, but I still enjoyed the story and learned plenty about Greece in the 1960s and 1970s in the process – particularly ship building and its prisons. It is, of course, all very well-researched.

‘One August Night’ can be read as a standalone, but I would strongly suggest that a reader will get vastly more out of it having read, enjoyed and digested ‘The Island’ first.