Live Coal in the Sea is a gripping account of a family’s struggles with loyalty, faith, commitment and identity. It’s central character is the noted astronomer Dr Camilla Dickinson, who is married to Macarios Xanthakos (whose father is an Episcopal bishop). Their son, Artaxias - a TV idol known to millions of fans as Taxi - is suffering from a career and identity crisis. He has deeply upset Raffi, his eighteen-year daughter, who, on a cold winter’s day, bursts in on Camilla, asking, ‘Are you or aren’t you my grandmother?
This skilfully plotted narrative shuttles between the distant past and the troubled present in its search for the truth behind a generational crisis. At the quest’s centre is the promiscuous past of Camilla’s attractive (and now dead) mother, Rose Rafferty Dickinson, and the puzzling question: was Rose actually Taxi’s mother and, if so, who is his father?
