A Theatre for Dreamers
by Polly Samson
A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson –sun, sex and Leonard Cohen.
Capturing the halcyon days of an artistic community on a Greek island in the 60s, this blissful novel of escapism is also a powerful meditation on art and sexuality.
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.