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 queen and king of
bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic,
destructive writer Axel Jensen; his dazzling wife, Marianne Ihlen; and the
young Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.
Into their midst arrives
Erica, a teenager 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 about the
wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.
“[A] fantastic summer read.”