House of Lost Dreams

"While everyone else reads John Grisham on the beach, why not sink your teeth into something darker? Graham Joyce has written a summer chiller as sharp as an ice cube on hot flesh." – Time Out

Mike and Kim Hansom, sell everything they own, give up their jobs, and land up on the Greek Island of Mavros, so that Mike can fulfil his ambition of painting full time. They rent a villa on the beach, it has no amenities to speak of, but the most "marvellous view in the world". They make friends with people in the village and are as happy as Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden; Ah! then enters, the serpents, the scorpion's, the saint, in "Metal Shoes", the shepherd and the mysterious "Watcher on the hill". From then on everything changes, and we find out the evil intent the house on the beach has on its tenants.

House Of Lost Dreams, Graham Joyce's third and "lost" novel, is located on a Greek island called Mavros (= Greek for The Black One). In fact Mavros is modelled exactly on the island of Lesbos, where Graham lived for a year early in his writing career. The house referred to was where he lived during that time, and the eponymous name of the house was not an invention. It is to be found near the village of Petra, "close enough to Turkey to hear the donkeys braying on the mainland". The mysterious bath referred to in the novel is the ancient hot spring at Eftalou; the church with the evil-eye mural is in the village of Molyvos; and the myth of the angel-militant in metal shoes is still widely believed on the island.