Twisting Plot

The Book Following the number one bestseller The Island, her debut novel, Victoria Hislop has repeated the trick with The Return.

The author’s first novel held the number one slot in The Sunday Times paperback charts for eight consecutive weeks.

It has sold one million copies and been translated into more than 20 languages. Now out in paperback, The Return, has also stormed to the top of the bestseller lists.

In The Return, Sonia and James are in trouble.

Despite the perfect wedding, the big house in Wandsworth, London, and their weekends in the country, they have grown apart.

James is drinking too much and Sonia seeks escape in her weekly dance lessons. So when Maggie, Sonia’s oldest friend, announces that she is whisking Sonia off to celebrate her birthday in Granada, Sonia doesn’t complain.

In Spain, the girls learn the rhythm of salsa and the raw passion of flamenco, and by night practise their new skills in the local bars. It is while Maggie is sleeping off her hangover that Sonia wanders the backstreets and discovers a quiet café, El Barril, and its friendly bartender, Miguel.

Over several visits, the two strike up an unlikely friendship.

Sonia is intrigued by old photographs of a beautiful flamenco dancer displayed on the wall, and Miguel embarks on the extraordinary tale behind them, of a family’s fight to survive the horror of Spain’s civil war.

The second section of the novel transports the reader back 70 years when Granada, under a new liberal government, was a place of optimism. In the Ramírez family's café, Concha and Pablo’s children relish an atmosphere of hope.

Antonio is a serious young socialist teacher, Ignacio a handsome and flamboyant matador, and Emilio a skilled musician.

Their sister, Mercedes, has a talent for flamenco. When she meets Javier Montero, a famous gypsy guitarra, she persuades him to play for her.

Her dancing astounds Javier, and they fall deeply in love.

But Spain is a country in turmoil, and in 1936 a revolution begins that will tear their family apart.

As Antonio is lured into battle, Mercedes resolves to go in search of Javier and embarks on a journey that will take her through war-ravaged Spain and ultimately to the safe shores of Britain.

It is here, many years later, that she meets a new dance partner and begins a life that Sonia discovers is more relevant to her than she ever could have envisaged.

In the final section of this 578-page bestseller, Hislop returns the reader to the present day, where Sonia gets Miguel to help her solve the Spanish Civil War mysteries, and there is a surprising twist in the tale before Sonia flies back to London to make a final decision about her marriage.

THE AUTHOR Victoria Hislop was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1959, and won the Newcomer of the Year award at the 2007 British Book Awards for her bestselling debut novel, The Island, set on a leper colony on a Greek island.

She is a former journalist and met her husband, Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, while studying English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, nearly 30 years ago.

The couple have two teenage children and live in Kent. At the moment, Mr Hislop is probably better known than his wife, but that might not be the case for too much longer if she continues to sell so many books.

Sales of The Island went through the roof after the book was included on Richard and Judy’s summer reading list and the author quickly earned £500,000 from the sales.

Mrs Hislop says she never really planned to write a novel, and didn’t dream of it being in the Top 20, Top 10 or number one.

To research The Return, she went to Spain to learn to dance, as does her heroine Sonia with her best friend Maggie. First she studied salsa and then flamenco, but tried not to stay in Spain for too long because she didn’t want to be away from her family.

Her parents divorced when she was a teenager. Her father remarried and had two more children, making four in all.

When the writer was a child, she wanted to be a tennis player at Wimbledon and spent hours hitting a ball against the wooden garage doors of her home in Kent.

She says her greatest inspiration comes from visiting unfamiliar foreign cities, sitting in cafes and eavesdropping on the local conversation. Her favourite building is the Alhambra, the palace of the Moors in Granada.

In a recent interview, she said all her money was spent on Greek lessons and learning the language was like “cracking a code, slowly but surely”.

Mrs Hislop is unashamed to say that she loves cars and drives an Audi convertible, often driving slowly so that she can spend longer in it. Her most valuable possession is a line drawing of her children which, she says, captures their essence in a way that photos can not. The Return is published by Headline Review, price £7.99.

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