Not ideal for an audiobook.

Before reading this, I was more aware of the work of Gerald Durrell, the naturalist and conservationalist, than his brother Lawrence, on whom the main character of this novel was based. For the purposes of the novel, Lawrence is renamed Julian Adie, a strange device that grated a bit.
Lawrence Durrell was born in India but subsequently moved to Corfu with his parental family at the age of 23. He obviously fell in love with the Island and wrote several books about it.

Deborah Lawrenson's book centres around two periods of 'Julian Adie's' life - his first marriage to Grace (also an alias), which ended in divorce with one daughter, and his supposed fling with Elizabeth, one summer after the death of his third wife, when he and Elizabeth spent a glorious few months together. The third time zone is the present day, when Melissa travels to Corfu to recover from her mother's death and her own a marital shock, and to find out what she could about a suggestion that her mother may have spent some time on the island before she was married and that she had known Julian Adie.

I think I enjoyed the account of Elizabeth and Adie's summer on Corfu most. The earlier days, with Grace, were less detailed and the current time zone contained the inevitable love affair which wasn't so well written and felt a bit contrived. Fortunately there were some wonderful Greek characters throughout and this was really what lifted the book for me.

I listened to this as an unabridged Audible download and found that in this format, the three time zones and multiple, often Greek names, were hard to keep track of. This is probably a book that should be read in paper format to facilitate checking back for details. I also felt that the voice that the narrator, Patience Tomlinson, used for Melissa, was very squeaky and annoying.

The book begged the question as to how much of the narrative was fact and how much fiction. Sometimes such books offer clarification at the end but there was no such epilogue here, which would have been useful. ( )

Impressive, evocative read - a must for Corfu-lovers. ( )

Songs of Blue and Gold is a novel about knowing yourself and where you come from. Melissa's life is in crisis, her marriage is cracking up and her mother is increasingly lost to the erasing power of Alzheimers. During brief minutes of clarity, her mother gives her a gift which hints at a secret past involving the great writer Julian Adie, who lived in Corfu when her mother was younger. Melissa decides to take a break from it all and heads out to Kalami to find out what happened back in the late 1960s.

Adie has been modelled closely on the writer and hedonist womaniser Lawrence Durrell who got through four wives, had a rather bohemian lifestyle lived mainly in Kalami in Corfu, and later the Languedoc. He wrote a lyrical semi-fictionalised account of his early Corfu life called Prospero's Cell, and after he became a literary superstar with the publication of the Alexandria Quartet, the White House in Kalami appears to have been quite a tourist attraction in this quiet corner of the island.

Enough potted history, at this point, I must declare that I have never read any of Lawrence Durrell. Like many of you I've read (and seen on TV) his brother's work My Family and Other Animals and that was the extent of my knowledge of the family. My Mum gave me three out of four of the Alexandria Quartet last year funnily enough, and after reading this super book, I will definitely seek them out, but you don't have to have read any Durrell to thoroughly enjoy this novel.

Melissa uncovers that her mother had an affair with Adie and even appeared to have had a grounding influence on him - now single after his first wife died. But for the presence of an old flame - a woman who drowned that summer and the locals couldn't, or wouldn't say what happened. When an academic writing a biography of Adie turns up on the scene and implies that her mother was involved in the accident, Melissa runs away to her family's holiday home in the Languedoc, where she uncovers her mother's writings which help her complete the story, and finds more local connections to Adie. Running alongside the quest is a lovely will they, won't they romance between Melissa and Alexandros, a historian who lives in Kalami; and Melissa's attempt to try and re-build a relationship with her husband.

Interestingly, the author prefaces the different sections with selections from the academic's biography of Adie, and Melissa's book putting things straight, which questions the purpose of biography without the full story. And we hear the story from the academic, the daughter, and her mother - a PoV device which Durrell used to great effect in the Alexandria Quartet (apparently).

There is so much more to this book than the washed out cover photo suggests. What is it with cover designers these days? It screams women's novel at you, but it is not really that at all; although the romance element is satisfying it deserves a wider readership. The Corfu sections in particular have a great sense of place, and the ex-pat community in the 1960s really comes alive. I highly recommend this novel, and look forward to reading others from this interesting author. ( )