Kronos by Laurie Devine

Why family sagas delight and charm us!

I love family sagas.  Love to read them as well as write them. Long ones especially. Stories woven within stories cast spells, with their lovable lovers and mean girls who don’t win. Family saga heaven is set in absorbing faraway countries that can cause lazy dreaming. And at the end, there’s a bonus:  learning a lot and broadening our worlds. Family sagas are good reads—and good writes for me!

So, long ago—this was the mid-1970s when I worked in high-stress Boston media—I did what many wannabe novelists dream of doing.  I turned an Egyptian vacation into a proposal for a Mideast family saga, sold it to a big New York publisher, drove my golden retriever to my parent’s in Pittsburgh, and moved by myself to Cairo to write my first novel, which became “Nile.”

More later about how all this wove together into my merry, eventful life.  Even remembering it all decades later, I have a big smile on my face and want to shout, “Whoopee!”  

But back to the glories of reading and writing Kronos, my Greek family saga which bursts with Hellenic dreamers and schemers. I am digitally publishing Kronos for the first time in the USA, although my British publisher helped make it a bestseller in Europe and Australia in the 1990s.

Kronos is my fourth Devine Saga. For more than a decade I had journeyed around Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and my London base researching and writing my three successful Mideast family sagas.

But then Greece called, and I answered.  

I had vacationed there, and I wanted more of it. 

Greece was the most beautiful place I’d ever been, and its ancient and recent history intrigued me. But surely, you might think, more than that must lead a writer halfway round the world to spend years writing a storybook. Oh, memory of caressive Aegean breezes on a ferryboat played a role. As did the azure color of the sea.  Maybe the source of my inspiration lay in the enchanting azure water, the same color on the cover of this book.

Whatever the imaginative allure… I soon found myself caught in reveries of Greece, and what I knew of its people. Before long I had characters, a plot, and a proposal that my London publisher funded with an “advance” to live on. Soon I was driving my battered old beige VW from London to Athens.

“Kronos” was, for me, the gift of the next four years living in Greece—on the Peloponnese, on various islands including Syros, and in an apartment in Athens.  So seductive was Greece that I tarried longer than expected and wrote another family saga, “Cypress,” which of course was set on Cyprus.

What I most value about family sagas is that this genre enables me to write deeply and truly about a country and region’s people, culture, and contributions. It’s not one little story, it’s many interwoven, complex stories over multiple generations about people’s lives—how they connect and fail to connect, how they love, what they value enough to die for; their nobility; and ultimately their humanity.

        I hope I do that, for you, dear readers, in Kronos.

Kronos ~ Now Available on Amazon Kindle!