Review of Island of Ghosts and Dreams by Christopher Cosmos

*Island of Ghosts and Dreams* by Christoper Cosmos (2026). Published by Pegasus Books.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

One of the classic ways I’ve discovered books, and something I’ve written about extensively on this blog for the past five years, is just wandering my library. I love to go and see what books just call to me in the moment, especially if it’s something I had never heard of or considered before I found it on the shelves.

And that’s how I found Island of Ghosts and Dreams! At the time of typing this I, like so many other people, have seen The Odyssey. While I can see some people returning to ancient Greece and it’s history, I wanted to know more about its contemporary events and what shaped it there. So this was the perfect read.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

On the island of Crete, one woman decides to resist against the invading Nazis in the 1940s, and it changes her life forever.

Our main character in this novel is Maria, but we don’t meet her at first. We originally meet William, a British soldier who was with the Greek platoons when Athens begins to fall in World War II. As he runs from the Germans, his fellow comrades dying all around him, he somehow manages to get on a boat. However, that boat capsizes and he washes up on the island of Crete.

It’s on Crete that he’s saved by Maria, a villager who lives with her family. Her husband, Demetrius, is away with the other Greek soldiers and she’s yearning for more information about what’s happening. The royal family fled to Crete and while the island has been spared from the fighting, the arrival of William sparks something new for their family.

They nurse him back to health then send him off with the other British soldiers in the area, and Demetrius returns from the war. The Greek soldiers who survived made the executive decision to return to their villages, if people are still alive, and protect what is left from the invasion. And when all seems well in Crete, the Germans go further South and begin invading the island.

That’s when everything begins to change for Maria. When the world she knows is taken away from her, she’s forced to reconsider what her life and future looks like. Something major is about to happen in the village, and she’s going to have to make some tough decisions that ultimately leads her down the path of revenge.

Like so many Creteans before her she has to defend everything she holds dear. That said, it’s going to be some ugly decision making along the way, which makes sense considering the fog of war. That also will put her on a crash collision course with William, who isn’t exactly done with his own enlistment in Greece.

Some interesting notes that broke elements of the novel for me: Maria learned English by watching movies in the town near her village, and she seems well educated for a Greek village woman at that time. Some of the references she makes implies that she’s worldly, but I doubted a woman of her status would be as educated as she was about some of these things.

I also found some of the commentary about the Turks to be loaded as well. I get that a Greek woman her age and in this time would have the feelings that were expressed in the novel, but I did a double take when I got to those portions of the text. I simply wasn’t expecting it.

Overall Thoughts

For the first half of this novel, I was really consumed by Maria and her world. I felt like we were living right alongside her relatives as they made elaborate spreads, only possible because they were not conquered yet, and how they kindly brought a British man into their home. That illusion was shattered along with Maria’s hopes and dreams, and I found the latter half of the novel harder to get through.

This was a well-written novel overall though. Cosmos has a talent for storytelling and I thought that the prose was well done. Sometimes I can and will drop books because I feel like the writing is lackluster, and this was one that I was impressed with overall.

I say read this one if it interests you! It’d be a good read over the weekend, especially if you enjoy historical fiction like this. It moves pretty quickly I will say.

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