BOOK REVIEW OF THE RETURN BY VICTORIA HISLOP

VICTORIA HISLOP'S FIRST NOVEL, The Island, was a phenomenon: a story of love and leprosy in wartime Crete, it dominated the bestseller lists for eight weeks, caught the fancy of Richard and Judy and sold a million copies in the UK. It is notoriously difficult for a second novel to recapture the success of a storming debut. The Return is Hislop's attempt to show it can be done.

Admirers of The Island will notice striking similarities between that and its successor. Each concerns a young woman, crossed in love and with an enigmatic family background, who goes on holiday to the Mediterranean only to find herself drawn into a complicated back story, the denouement to which is a revelation about her own past.

The young woman on this occasion is Sonia Cameron, daughter of kindly, nondescript Jack Haynes and his wife, Mary, who died of multiple sclerosis when Sonia was 16, a decade before Sonia's marriage to her much older banker husband, James, with whom she now resides in Wandsworth, in genteel domestic alienation. James has recently taken to the bottle, in a posh sort of way: among the causes of his discontent are Sonia's failure to produce a son, her newly-acquired interest in salsa dancing, and the fact that she proposes to pursue her hobby on a jaunt to Spain with her rackety old schoolfriend, Maggie."