SEEING AND BELIEVING

What happened next What happened to the boys?

Once upon a lifetime, twenty-five years ago or more, I wrote a book called A Foreign Wife. In it I recorded my experiences during my first five years in the Peloponnesian village to which I had unexpectedly migrated in 1980.

Life in the Peloponnese continues to delight and challenge Gillian Bouras: Seeing and Believing resumes the narrative as her sons create their own families and time delivers a fresh crop of joys and heartaches, to which she tries to adjust.

Acutely responsive to what she calls 'the conspiracy of beauty in Greece, ' she celebrates the natural world in prose that indicates a lifelong engagement with words. Global events send her to historians for enlightenment, while tragedy closer to home - fire, unexpected death - prompts reflection on the solace of contrasting creeds. In between she observes the human comedy with dry humour.

Gillian Bouras was born in Melbourne in 1945. She worked as a teacher in Australia before moving to Greece with her husband and children in 1980. Her first books were about this experience. She lives in the Peloponnese, Greece, as well as maintaining ties with Australia. Her journalism has been published in six countries.