The Olive Tree

The Olive Tree is Lucinda Riley’s contemporary novel, originally published in 2007 under the title The Helena and reissued under its better known title in subsequent editions. The book is set in modern Cyprus and follows three generations of a complicated family as they gather at the Mediterranean villa called Pandora for a summer reunion that brings a long buried family secret to the surface.

Helena, a former ballerina, has inherited her godfather’s beautiful old Cypriot villa, where she spent the most magical summer of her teenage years more than two decades earlier. She brings her husband William, her children, and her stepson Alex to spend the summer at Pandora, hoping the place will work some of the same magic on her family that it once worked on her. Alex, in particular, is struggling. Highly intelligent, emotionally precocious, and dealing with the ordinary cruelties of being a thirteen year old who does not quite fit anywhere, he becomes the central perspective character through whom much of the novel’s mystery is filtered. As Helena’s old summer flame Alexis turns out to be the Pandora villa’s neighbor and old friend, the family dynamics start to get more complicated than any of the adults intended.

Lucinda Riley wrote a kind of accessible, glossy contemporary fiction that drew on real Mediterranean settings and on the multigenerational family secrets that her readers loved. The Olive Tree has many of the elements that would later define her bestselling Seven Sisters series. Beautiful international locations, family histories with hidden chapters, romances that span decades, and a slow building emotional payoff that the patient reader is rewarded for sticking with.

For readers who came to Lucinda Riley through The Seven Sisters books, this earlier novel is a comfortable return to her style. For new readers, the Cyprus setting and the central mystery make for a satisfying summer read. Riley passed away in 2021 and her catalogue of completed novels has gained additional attention since, with both new readers and longtime fans returning to her earlier work.