Kay Cicellis(1926–2001) was born to Greek parents in Marseilles, where she spent her first nine years. Having learned French and English in the nursery, she spent her later childhood in Athens and on her father’s native island of Cephalonia. Her first stories, smuggled out of Athens during the Nazi occupation, were published in the British military press when she was a teenager. Her first story collection, The Easy Way, appeared with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West in 1950. Apart from The Way to Colonos, Cicellis published a second collection, Death of a Town, and two novels, Ten Seconds from Now and No Name in the Street.She went on to become known as the preeminent Greek-English translator of her time, while working actively to oppose the right-wing dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.

• Foreword by Rachel CuskAuthor’s NoteThe Way to ColonosThe ReturnThe Exile

“A woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off [of] conventions . . . She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes.”—Rachel Cusk, from the Foreword“Who but a Greek has a better right to raid Greek tragedy? Kay Cicellis, a Greek who writes the kind of English most English writers might envy . . . proves brilliantly that heart and character can still forge chains as shackling as those of 23 centuries ago . . . Cicellis has chosen to contract her drama to excellent effect [with] largeness of heart and a glowing style. If her people are the losers of the world, they are dressed in a human dignity of her making.”—TIME“Kay Cicellis will go very far.”—Vita Sackville-West“Cicellis . . . looks at life steadily and as if for the first time, with profound watchfulness, as if nothing else mattered. That is her essential originality; she has her own vision of life . . . Cicellis takes life from many sides, and is always sensitively conscious of the quality of the situation she describes. She has a style which catches the intimate nature of things and never stops at the surface. She is a remarkable writer.”—Edwin Muir, The Observer“One of the most refreshing and exciting of the world’s younger women novelists.”—Linda Brandi, The New York Times“Cicellis [has a] luminous sensibility and genuine compassion . . . Her prose is as light-intoxicated as the air of her native Greece, but her vision of life has a dark, existential pathos.”—TIME“Her style is simple . . . her narrative is well-knit, and her detail cleverly observed and selected.”—David Tylden-Wright, Times Literary Supplement“Cicellis writes of very modern things and people . . . but the excellence of her writing lies in the fact that it has a timeless quality, a continuity with antiquity, a colour and warmth that is Greek whatever the time.”—Times Literary Supplement“Cicellis . . . has a startling talent, and her fluent precision lends a kind of dignity to the characters she creates.”—Marigold Johnson, Times Literary Supplement“She is like Penelope at her web, shuttling the coloured threads to and fro, weaving into the pattern love and hate, laughter and death . . . infinitely subtle.”—Peter Green, Daily Telegraph“War and circumstance have made her an English writer of high intelligence and great perspicaciousness exactly expressed.”—Martin Shuttleworth, The Listener