The Wind Off the Small Isles — Mary Stewart

Mary Stewart's new story is lit with the special magic of people and of place that are the hallmarks of a famous author's best work. In a series of deft brush-strokes she brings her heroine, Perdita West -- a beautiful twenty-three-year-old -- to vivid life. As secretary to the redoubtable children's novelist, Cora Gresham, Perdita's job carries her to the Canary Islands in search of local colour for a new masterpiece, and a peaceful house in which to write it.

But the house is already occupied -- once by the past, and the haunting memory of what happened there a century ago; and now by its present owners -- very much alive -- a famous playwright and his research assistant, Michael. In the fierce beauty of the volcanic landscape, in the persons of Perdita and Michael, past and present meet, violently. The weird, semi-deserted island of Lanzarote is the scene for the collision which re-shapes the lives of the young lovers, as it did a hundred years ago.

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Yes, the wind blew still. On the wall of the goat-pen near the cliff's edge she could see the bougainvillea tossing, and above the roof the palm-leaves shuffled and clicked like playing cards...

1879, Lanzarote. A wealthy young woman elopes with an impoverished fisherman, leaving her family distraught.

1968. Perdita West, secretary to a famous author, visits Lanzarote on a research trip and begins to fall in love with the unusual, beautiful little island. When, while snorkelling, a landslide traps Perdita in an underwater cave, her efforts to save herself will reveal what happened to the ill-fated couple who fell in love at this very spot almost a century ago...

This edition of Mary Stewart's long-lost novella also includes a recently rediscovered short story, 'The Lost One', now back in print for the first time since 1960.