Love in the Land of Midas

I expected a soppy love story when I got this book, so put off reading it until I had nothing new left to read. As the old saying goes, never judge a book by it's cover...This novel covers 50 years with two intimately entwined stories, two generations apart. The older generation is in war-torn Greece in 1948, where a carefree French journalist, Pascal, becomes obsessed with an idealistic guerilla, Daphne. The younger generation are two young people drifting, trying to rediscover their roots. Veronique's family is unbelievably rich, and she spends her life wandering the Mediterranean, but yearns to find out what happened to her long lost father who disappeared in 1967. Theo is an Australian of Macedonian descent who is doing research into Alexander the Great when he stumbles across Veronique.The story is of loves lost and found, mixed with the brutality first of Greece's "civil" war in the 1940s, and then of it's dictatorship in the 1960s.The plot may seem a little contrived, but this book is not about plot, but characters. Kassabova paints pictures of the characters of amazing depth, of their loves and wishes, of their secrets and pain, of hidden pasts. The setting of the story makes the emotions the characters feel seem all the stronger, especially when falling in love with the wrong person can cost you your life.Mills and Boon this isn't, despite the title.