For a while, she's more inclined to trust an English author who lives nearby, until the night she discovers just which one is smuggling money into communist Albania. Lucy can't quite believe in his good intentions, even when he helps her launch a beached dolphin. He has a handsome son who acts peculiar enough to alert the heroine and the reader that something is rotten in Corfu. Lucy's stretch of beach includes a slightly unhinged Shakespearean actor who spouts appropriate lines from the play.
Believed by some to be the real scene of The Tempest, Corfu lies across from the Albanian coast. Stewart wrote a trilogy of hugely popular novels about the life of Merlin – The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment – a departure from her previous books, along with acclaimed children's books, including Ludo and the Star Horse and A Walk in Wolf Wood.Then young actress-at-liberty Lucy Waring vacations with her married sister on the Greek island of Corfu, she finds exactly what Mary Stewart's fans have come to expect in her novels - an atmosphere hazed in suspense with a vegetation of character as thick as the foliage. Stewart called her books "light, fast-moving stories, which are meant to give pleasure, and where the bees in the writer's bonnet are kept buzzing very softly indeed", saying she was "first and foremost a teller of tales, but I am also a serious-minded woman who accepts the responsibilities of her job, and that job, if I am to be true to what is in me, is to say with every voice at my command: 'We must love and imitate the beautiful and the good.'" The author herself had once said she would "take conventionally bizarre situations (the car chase, the closed-room murder, the wicked uncle tale) and send real people into them, normal, everyday people with normal, everyday reactions to violence and fear people not 'heroic' in the conventional sense, but averagely intelligent men and women who could be shocked or outraged into defending, if necessary, with great physical bravery, what they held to be right".
'Light, fast-moving stories' … the novels of Mary Stewart
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