Ariadne 's Brother - a novel on the fall of Bronze Age Crete, by John Dempsey

A vivid tale of action and the love of life, of conflict and passionate vision and political change at the dawn of Western Civilization. Ariadne---new young Queen of Minoan Crete, beloved of the narrator, Deucalion---struggles to uphold her family's and her people's ways amid threats of natural disaster and military invasion by the Achaian/Mycenean "future Greeks," whose Homeric histories our world knows too well. Did you know that Crete really was/is the longest continuous period of Western cultural development? What happened to bring on a Dark Age? Was it "inevitable," or a matter of choices made and still being made? This is an epic adventure blending myth and new decades of archaeological and other evidence into a story of real people who lived long ago and whose extraordinary legacy is still ours to embrace.

John "Jack" Dempsey grew up on the North Shore of Boston and began his writing career in New York City. After 2 years in Crete on this book, he took his Ph.D. from Brown University in Early and Native American Literatures, and he has edited several works (see "Jack Dempsey") on those subjects and produced two documentary films as well. He has taught at Brown, Wheaton and Bentley Colleges, and is reportedly crazy enough to be working on a sequel to "Ariadne's Brother" called "People of the Sea: A Novel of the Promised Land."

Kalentis Editions - 682 pages - 12X21cm - Paperback