1960. Teenage Erica arrives on Hydra with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. She has come to meet her mother's old friend, the charismatic writer Charmian Clift, who with her husband, the brilliant but irascible George Johnston, rules the island's tangled bohemian utopia. And in this circle there forms a triangle: the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzlingly beautiful wife Marianne, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. An atmospheric novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost.