Thomas Lawrence

The Under Side of Paradise Thomas Lawrence

Fethiye is a small seaport on Turkey's Aegean shore where each summer starting in May tourists from across Europe and England flock to exchange gloomy skies and rain for sand and sea and sometimes sex, beneath a hot bright Mediterranean sun. Connie Cullingsworth, whose life this novel is a portrait of, flies to Fethiye to rescue her daughter who has been robbed and will need money. Accompanying Connie is her second husband, Charles, a computer whiz who lives in his world of cyberspace and remains indifferent to her needs and desires, as she discovers too late. A teacher schooled in Romanticism, Connie had always dreamt of seeing the Mediterranean, birthplace of western art and literature; and in Bea's Bar, she meets Omer whose charismatic charm she finds she is unable to resist when he offers to teach her to swim. As a girl Connie had almost drowned in a Scottish loch, and ever since she has feared water. But in the end Connie must learn that Paradise has its darker side