Originally published: London : Jonathan Cape, 2001.

"In the early 1960s Emma Tennant's parents spotted a magical bay and decided to build a house there. Rovinia, as the house is called, is on the west coast of Corfu, above the bay and beach where - legend has it - Nausicaa rescued the shipwrecked Odysseus. There the Ionian Sea shades from emerald to deep ultramarine much like each day blends into the next, as it has for uncountable ages." "Women did the heavy lifting, the architect was local, but Tennant's mother and late father transformed the house into art. The grace of proportion and design charms anyone who steps out onto the terrace, or looks through the wide doorway into the room where her father sat at his desk; it's particularly apparent in Tennant's mother's room with three windows looking out on bay and forested hill, where "the sea provides an ever-changing wallpaper; otherwise there is only the whiteness of light."" "Rovinia's pleasures are many: breakfast figs picked behind the house, "a slab of local bread spread with honey so rich and gold the bees must have swarmed from Mount Olympus." There are boat trips to Mathraki and down the coast to little-known beaches. And flowers: clouds of poppies on the Plain of Ropa, blue and scarlet pimpernel "peering up like jeweled eyes." Why should summer ever end?" "Along with these beauties, Tennant offers us the delights and frustrations of daily adventures on a Greek island - salt water in the well, roads to nowhere, collapsing walls - with a love that can be kindled only by the place that truly feels like home. Full of color and life, A House in Corfu shows the huge changes in island life since the time of the family's arrival, and celebrates, equally, the joy of belonging to a timeless world: the world of vine, olive and sea."--BOOK JACKET