It’s probably not surprising that the two recurring themes in Greece: A Love Story, subtitled, Women write about the Greek Experience, are godly young men and goodly amounts of Ouzo. These are two things for which Greece has been long famed and it seems that time has not diminished the appeal of either the eternal Adonis, or the anise-flavoured liqueur.

Camille Cusumano has put together a collection of nineteen stories, or travel essays,  provided by an eclectic group of American writers, all of whom it is clear, are enchanted with Greece for its beauty, tradition and spirit …. along with its young men and its national drink.

Greece is one of those countries which comes alive in an instant with the mere uttering of a word: Acropolis, Aphrodite, Parthenon, Socrates, Moussaka, Souvlaki, and of course, Adonis and Ouzo!

While the history of Greece in all its myth and wonder forms a backdrop to these very personal stories, it is the country and its people in the here and now which are brought alive in Greece: A Love Story. And no doubt that is exactly how Homer, Sappho and Sophocles, to mention just a few of the Greek literary giants, would have it, for they too wrote about the world around them.

This odyssey is reflected in the essay titles: Kostas and the Deep Sea, Going Home to Greece, View from the Bar Top, At the Seashore with Medea, Finding the Goddess in Zeus’s Cave, Yeia sas!, Rhodes’s Lost Little Jerusalem, Dancing on the Wine Dark Sea, Hooked on Octopus in Molyvos and Bitter Oranges … to name some of them.

Travel writing is always personal because we all see from our own perspective and perception. What we are and what we believe will always colour what we experience. No two young Greek gods will ever be the same. All of these women have gone to Greece for their own reasons and while they have much in common, each story offers a unique insight, not only into Greece, but into the writer’s heart and mind.

Alison Cadbury looks for peace and quiet in the Greek countryside and finds herself at loggerheads with the 90-year-old landlord who seems intent on ensuring she has anything but peace and quiet.  It is only when she gets to know him that she can understand why.

While Katherina Audley is dancing   on the tops of bars in Greek tavernas, Linda Hefferman is trying to please her hosts by eating a lovingly prepared dish of goat entrails. Colleen McGuire is an expat married to her Greek Adonis who travels around her new home on a bicycle and Liza Monroy visits her expat mother in Greece only to find herself making an unexpected ‘journey into adulthood.’

But for some, Greece is a place of mourning. Diane LeBow’s story recounts the visit she made with her fun-loving 80-year-old mother and how, later, she returns to cast her mother’s ashes to the wind and sea. Simone Butler also takes her mother’s ashes, after her untimely death, to mix in Greek soil. Greece for her is a quest for inner peace. As it is for Marilyn McFarlane, who explores the sacred depths of Delphi, following her younger sister’s death from cancer. For these women Greece is a place of sacred healing and redemption as it has been for millenia.

It is in Athens, while eating sweet pastries, that Amanda Castleman hears her husband say he is divorcing her. And it is in the mountains of northern Greece that Ashley Black tracks the hidden history of her past as she searches for her biological parents.

For every woman there is an experience, and a story, and a Greece which is hers alone. Like the greatest of Greek myths, this anthology touches upon the realities of life:<