The Honey Year

When Effie Marakis returns to her grandmother's cottage on a Greek island, she finds nine years of dust - and a tin of recipe cards that do not behave like recipes.

It is 1923, and London has quietly finished with her: the school where she taught has closed, the building sold, her life there packed away in an afternoon. But a solicitor's letter arrives with two old keys, and the island of Anemos holds a whitewashed cottage, a fig tree in the yard, and the family name hammered in iron above the door.

Effie expects hard work. She finds Petros, her grandmother's ancient tortoise, and - hidden beneath a loose kitchen floorboard - a battered tin filled with handwritten cards in her grandmother's script. The remedies inside are for bread that won't rise, hearths that won't draw, fig trees that have forgotten how to fruit, fishermen's hands cracked by winter salt. The remedies, impossibly, work.

As the seasons turn and the village begins to trust her with its griefs, Effie discovers that the tin was never only hers. It belongs to every woman who has held it before her - and perhaps to the quiet beekeeper three doors west, who has tended her grandmother's hives for nine years and never stopped waiting.

She came to the island to settle an estate. She may have stayed to begin one.