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“Families
are strange and wonderful organisms. Bound by blood,
they embody relationships which can be at once loving
and nurturing, fragile and combustible. Every family
is different, each one unique – but all confront
difficulties and dramas common to the human condition.”
In this epic saga written from the sublime peace of his
Aegean archipelago, Kit Chapman unravels the turbulent
story of his family. It is a tale of fortunes won and lost,
of bitter rivalries, death and suicide, moral angst, and
the consuming love affair of his parents, Etty and Peter.
Born into a long line of glamorous European hoteliers,
Kit stumbles upon the truth, and potential scandal, surrounding
the unexpected death of his famous grandfather, Henry Prüger
– a black secret the family has covered up for nearly eighty
years. The shock of Prüger’s death in 1929 affected his
three teenage sons for the rest of their lives. And for
Peter, the youngest, the trauma was assuaged only by his
passionate romance and marriage to Etty in Greece after
the war.
In the 1950s, the young family – Peter, Etty, Kit and Gerald,
settled into life at Taunton’s
Castle Hotel. But by the
Seventies, the pressures of a controlling and egocentric
mother drove her two grown-up children to break free. For
ten dark years, Gerald struggled with his homosexuality
before coming out – an announcement which devastated his
father. And when Kit and his wife, Louise, joined the business,
their bitter conflict with Etty and the tragedy of Gerald’s
death by AIDS eventually split the family and brought the
Castle to the brink of bankruptcy.
My Archipelago is a powerful and extraordinary story. For
Kit Chapman it is also a journey of reconciliation – an
attempt to understand, forgive and heal the scars left
by his battles with his parents.
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