Reading Arnold Zable reminds me a bit of reading the great Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer. Like Singer, Zable's tales are about ordinary lives, about greed and ambition, about love and hope, and about dreams and myths. They are filled with warmth, wonder, pleasure and disappointment – and occasionally with a touch of steel. In his earlier books he has written about the emigrant experience.

In Sea of Many Returns he writes about the Greek island of Ithaca. For the islanders, emigration was an interregnum; a time to explore, perhaps to make some money and then to return. Through the eyes of two generations, Zable observes the different experiences over different generations through the journals of Mentor and his Australian granddaughter Xanthe. Through their observations and experiences, Zable weaves the experiences of emigration and longing for homeland into a powerful picture. Xanthe's return to the island and her reading of Mentor's journals explains the bitterness, frustration and anger of her father, stranded in a land that he never quite felt part of or quite welcome in.

Zable beautifully captures the rhythms and changes to island life over four generations. The stoicism comes and the sense of history comes forcefully through. The gods gaze down from Mt Olympus and life ‘is just a hole in the water’. Certainly a wonderful achievement.