Andi Rădiu

Athens, October 2024. In a house that smells of dried lavender and time, Thea Papadaki finds a journal that was never meant to be read. Its author is Heleni - a woman born in another century, whose story begins in Thessaloniki in 1889 and ends on Spinalonga, the white-stone islet off the coast of Crete where, for half a century, Greece sent its lepers and looked away. Written in secret, page by page, her journal records what official history never did: the lives, loves, and unspoken crimes of the island of the exiled.
As Thea reads, two women separated by more than a century begin an impossible conversation - and Thea realizes that the journal is not only Heleni's story. It is a door into her own family's deepest silence, and into a crime that has no name. Told in two alternating voices - the journal and its reader - this is a novel about the people history quarantined, the words that outlive stone walls, and the courage it takes, in any century, to finally speak.
Part of The Secrets of Crete, a series of standalone novels spanning four thousand years of Cretan history. Each book can be read independently.