Book launch tour for The Letter from the Island

By Kimberly Sullivan | October 24, 2025 |

I’m pleased to be joining the Bookouture launch tour for Rose Alexander’s latest novel, The Letter from the Island.Letter from the Island blog tour

I enjoyed this dual timeline novel set in modern-day and WWII-era Crete, Greece. Dual timeline novels are a genre I love, and especially a novel like this in which an elderly woman is looking back upon her life from a world away, opening up painful wartime memories she’d long buried – of necessity – from her native land.

In modern-day London, an elderly Greek woman and widow, Calliope, receives a letter from her native Crete. She is shocked to learn the letter is written by her twin sister – the sister she long believed was killed in the war.

Calliope’s return voyage to her Mediterranean island with her beloved granddaughter, Ella, is interspersed with the brutal tale of Nazi-occupied Crete during the second world war. Calliope is a young woman who is radicalized by the killing of her young brother, and joins the resistance.

Her daring efforts assist the Allied forces, but also place her family at risk. When her parents and twin sister are killed in a Nazi raid, she must gather the courage to escape her beloved island, and to forge a new life for herself in far-away England. Until she must return to own up to the mistakes of her past.

This is a sweeping story of love, loyalty, survival, and the impossible choices made in the throes of war.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy – all thoughts are my own.

 

From the publisher:The Letter from The Island

Every week Calliope writes a letter to her twin sister who died sixty years ago. One day, she receives a letter back…

Present day, London. Now an elderly lady and living alone in her basement flat, Calliope desperately misses the sun-soaked olive groves of her Greek island home. It has been over sixty years since she ran away. When the letter postmarked from Crete lands on her doorstep, she is shocked to the core by what it says. Her twin sister is alive: We need to talk about what happened.

Now Calliope must make a confession to her beloved granddaughter Ella. Calliope needs to lay her lifetime of secrets to rest, and she needs Ella’s help…

1944, Crete. Calliope clutches the baby to her chest as they run down the cliff path to the blue water of the harbour. She is all the little one has left now, and they must escape. The boat the Allies sent won’t wait forever. If only she’d reached the village sooner, her twin sister would still be alive. She will never forgive herself, but she must stay strong for the baby.

Calliope must make one final journey home. And what her and her granddaughter discover in Crete will change the course of their lives forever…

A heartbreaking and uplifting novel of a family torn apart by a devastating secret that will sweep you away across the glittering sea to Greece. Fans of Victoria Hislop, The Letter and Fiona Valpy won’t be able to put this beautiful book down.

Publishing date: 24 October 2025

Amazon: https://geni.us/B0FP2YMSRDsocial

 

Rose Alexander

Rose AlexanderRose Alexander has had more careers than she cares to mention and is currently a secondary school English teacher.

She writes in the holidays, weekends and evenings, whenever she has a chance, although with three children, a husband, a lodger and a cat, this isn’t always as often as she’d like. She’s a keen sewist and is on a mission to make all her own clothes.

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