On this island everyone knows what is happening. There is nowhere to not know.
Elena Costa arrives on Hydra on commission: a piece on the island's economy of care - the system of transport and maintenance that operates without a single motor vehicle. What she finds is Petros Valakis, a third-generation island keeper whose family has maintained the island's donkey transport service since 1887, who has not left the island in twenty years, and who holds in his body the complete knowledge of forty kilometres of paths, sixty-eight cisterns, and one hundred and forty building delivery profiles that appear in no written record.
He stays. She has never once managed to stay.
This is the tension that The Last Ferry from Hydra builds across four weeks of March on a car-free Aegean island: the practitioner whose knowledge requires the staying, and the journalist who records the practices and then departs.
Book Nine in the Elena Costa Series. First chapter of the second collection: The Wall We Left Standing.
Bonus: Listen to the original title song "Stay Till the Last Ferry" - composed and produced by Bruce Whitecorner.
Listen on Apple Music.