In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer-daughter Susan, who asked her mother-on a whim-if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera. What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother-daughter relationship told in irresistible prose.

Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.