A Theatre for Dreamers An Observer Fiction Highlight 2020 The Sunday Times bestseller

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 king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, 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 the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius. An Observer Fiction Highlight 2020 'Oh my god, this book! I don't have words to convey its brilliance' MARIAN KEYES 'A glorious novel' KATE MOSSE 'If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one' ANDREW O'HAGAN 'The best book I've read all year' JOANNE HARRIS 'Superb' THOMAS KENEALLY