A Theatre for Dreamers

Featuring bonus track and original music from Pink Floyd's David Gilmour

The Sunday Times bestseller and an Observer Fiction highlight 2020

1960. The world is dancing on the edge of revolution, and nowhere more so than on the Greek island of Hydra, where a circle of poets, painters and musicians live tangled lives, ruled by the writers Charmian Clift and George Johnston, troubled king and queen of bohemia. Forming within this circle is a triangle: its points the magnetic, destructive writer Axel Jensen, his dazzling wife Marianne Ihlen, and a young Canadian poet named Leonard Cohen. Into their midst arrives teenage Erica, with little more than a bundle of blank notebooks and her grief for her mother. Settling on the periphery of this circle, she watches, entranced and disquieted, as a paradise unravels.

Burning with the heat and light of Greece, A Theatre for Dreamers is a spellbinding novel about utopian dreams and innocence lost – and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.

'Delicious' NIGELLA LAWSON

'Oh my god, this book! I don't have words to convey its brilliance' MARIAN KEYES

'A glorious novel' KATE MOSSE

'If summer was suddenly like a novel, it would be like this one' ANDREW O'HAGAN

'The best book I've read all year' JOANNE HARRIS

'Superb' THOMAS KENEALLY

Narrated by Polly Samson
© 2020 Polly Samson
All music by David Gilmour
“Yes, I Have Ghosts” Lyrics by Polly Samson
Performed by David Gilmour with Romany Gilmour
The moral right of the author has been asserted
(p) 2020 Polly Samson under license to W.F. Howes Ltd
All music (p) 2020 David Gilmour Music Ltd.
All songs Pink Floyd Music Publishers Ltd