When Susan Johnson began planning her return to Kythera, the Greek island of her youthful summers, she knew it would be different this time around. The Australian writer first “fell fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera” in the 1970s on a trip “that set the course for the rest of my life – as a writer, as a perennial exile, as a person”.
Returning as a 62-year-old, she was also now travelling with her 85-year-old mother, Barbara. What Johnson could not forecast was the extreme emotional climate that would buffet them both.
