A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson #Review

What a great tour there has been to celebrate Polly Samson's  A Theatre for Dreamers. This may be its final day, but there are plenty of great bloggers to look back at who have praised this novel- just check out the poster at the foot of this post.

 

A Theatre for Dreamers is a novel about a place and a circle that have transfixed the world for decades

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. 

‘Superb’                                                            Thomas Kenneally   ‘

If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one. Immaculate’                                                        Andrew O’Hagan 

‘A sheer delight –  I’ve never been to Hydra but this book transports you and miraculously, you are there in 1960’ 

                                                                                     Jenny Éclair

My Thoughts

If ever a book was tailor made to be read on a sunny day, this is it. All the sights, the sounds, the colours, the scents of Hydra, in Greece are evoked in its pages. The light shimmers over the characters who are living out a Summer there in 1960. Before the Swinging 60's got underway, these bohemian  writers and composers are caught together, observed by the teenage Erica. 

     Of course, all is not well in this paradise and as Erica comes to realise, there is hurt and longing mixed together beneath the surface. Some of the behaviour is cruel and bitter but often it seems hidden away, hinted at. With some real life characters at the centre, you feel that you are looking in at a particular moment in their life accessible through the art which was produced. Unconventional though they may be, the feelings at the heart of it all are universal. 

In short: Greece shimmers. 
 

About the Author

 

Polly Samson is the author of two short story collections and two previous novels. Her work has been shortlisted for prizes, translated into several languages and has been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. She has written lyrics to four number one albums and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  

You can follow Polly here: Website  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  

Book link: Amazon UK 

Thanks to Polly Samson, Bloomsbury Samson and Anne Cater of Random Things Tours for a copy of the book and a place on the tour.

                                                     Check out these great bloggers!