Shabbu

Using their two-perspective approach of coauthoring, American author, habu, brings the retiring American lawyer, Paul, to Spain's Galicia region in hopeless pursuit of love of a younger Spanish guitarist, and Australian author, Sabb, in turn, has brought the younger Australian, Alex, to Galicia by way of England and as secretary to a Spanish-British author who has returned to Galicia to die.As the two move closer together through networking and the process of rebuilding their lives in their new habitat, Paul goes through a succession of emotionally unsatisfying casual affairs and the frustration of renovating a derelict village house. At the same time, Alex has casual affairs of his own while turning the sprawling mansion he has inherited into a B&B. Both, in their more mature phase of life-and whether they consciously understand it or not-are seeking a more stable relationship. And quite possibly, without knowing it, they are finding what they need as they drift toward each other.

For fifty years men come to the island of Cyprus, a Mediterranean paradise split and war torn by a marathon ethnic struggle between Greek and Turk, to the villa where British novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote his acclaimed Alexandria Quartert. Each one comes pulled by his own desires and by the whisperings of the villa itself and each is enticed down to the Tree of Idleness caf on the Bellapais square. There they ogle and are, in turn, ogled by the young Turkish Cypriot men there-and take those men back to the villa for hours of unfettered, wanton pleasure, oblivious to any threat of personal damage or to the rending of the delicate balance of the island's social structure.And it is not only the foreign visitors to Bellapais who are affected by the enticement woven by the Bellapais villa. The local men, as well, the young-and maturing and aging-men in the Tree of Idleness caf are caught up in the constantly reweaving web of desire and wanton lust, island sexual customs, and doomed relationships.Just when it appears that the villa is willing to put the cycle to rest, to offer solace to those who have found each other again and chosen constancy over wantonness, the villa's enticing whisperings of the delights of the Tree of Idleness caf down on the Bellapais square begin anew.