No Passion In The Mind

He was the man of every woman’s dreams. Two women loved him. He loved them back. Yet they rejected him. Why? The Greek-born family matriarch is determined to marry off her grandson and heir to a woman of her own choice. He is torn between a “traditional” sense of loyalty to family and a more “modern” conception of love and marriage. Twice, his prospective brides have their own hidden agendas first for accepting then rejecting him. A suspenseful tale of love, hate and revenge, crisply and compellingly told, unfolds. The entire action of the story takes place within six months against a backdrop of prolific but sometimes menacing natural beauty in and around the sugar-cane fields of tropical Australia – a land of savannah plains, World Heritage-listed rain forests, relentless and occasionally cyclonic deluges, endless glistening beaches, seductive South Pacific islands and the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef. The same few months of the narrative correspond with the planting, ripening, burning and harvesting of the sugar-cane which also serve as a kind of underlying metaphor for the protean relationship between the two principal protagonists.