The Echoes of Love by Jenny Ashcroft; emotional tale of secrets, love, loyalty and family – book review –

Jenny Ashcroft, whose epic novels – including Island in the East and Beneath a Burning Sky – are always rich in extensive research and historical detail, looks to her own family’s mixed Greek and English heritage for this enthralling and deeply emotional tale of secrets, love, loyalty and family.

With its vibrant and cinematic descriptions of this glittering and bejewelled island, The Echoes of Love is both a heartfelt love letter to Crete and a tribute to the thousands of men, women and children – including Ashcroft’s own great-grandparents – who were murdered during the four brutal years of occupation.

Blending the real wartime suffering of Crete – some gleaned from her family’s own experiences and some from memoirs and histories – Ashcroft brings us an unforgettable story of the forbidden love between a courageous SOE agent on a spying mission in Crete and a young German officer facing the greatest dilemma of his life.

Nineteen-year-old Eleni Adams has been coming to Crete her entire life, swapping her home in Portsmouth for cherished sun-baked summers with her maternal grandfather Yorgos in the seaside villa where her long-dead Cretan mother grew up.

Eleni’s English father Timothy Adams is a naval captain who travels the world and so the villa situated between Chania and Souda in Crete is ‘her constant,’ and her summer sojourns there are the time of year when her ‘monochrome world shifted fully into colour, and her loneliness gave way to belonging.’

And when she arrives in 1936, she believes the long, hot weeks ahead will be no different to so many that have gone before. But someone else is visiting the island that year… a young German man called Otto.

The two of them meet as they swim in the azure waters of the Aegean Sea, and – far from the Nazis’ Berlin Olympics and the brewing civil war in Spain – they share the happiest time of their lives… a summer of innocence lost and love discovered, one that is finite but not the end.

But five years later, in 1941, the island has fallen to a Nazi invasion, and Eleni and Otto meet there once more. It’s a very different place to the one they knew. Secrets have become the norm... they are traded for lives, and trust is a luxury few can indulge in.

This time Eleni has returned as an SOE operative to fight for her family homeland, and Otto to occupy it. They are enemies, and their love is not only treacherous, but also dangerous. But will it destroy them, or prove strong enough to overcome the ravages – and treacheries – of war?

Prepare to shed tears as Ashcroft plucks at our heartstrings in this exquisitely romantic and yet gripping and gritty story which moves from an idyllic summer on Crete in the pre-war lull of 1936, through the devastation of the war years and on to a mysterious witness account given incognito in London in 1974.

The deep and timeless love affair between Eleni and Otto, which blossoms against the tranquillity and translucent beauty of the island during pre-war days of endless sunshine, acts as the starkest and cruellest of contrasts to the events and horrors that face the islanders in the years to come.

For brave Eleni and troubled Otto, their great passion will be tested and tossed by the winds of war and the fickleness of fate, but they will also face the anguish of divided loyalties and a cold-blooded betrayal which will echo down the years.

With a fast-moving plot, exquisitely drawn characters, a pervading sense of menace that ratchets up the tension, and an emotional temperature that sends the heart’s mercury soaring, The Echoes of Love is Ashcroft’s most moving and enthralling novel yet.

(HQ, hardback, £14.99)