Beneath the Cypress Tree cover art

Beneath the Cypress Tree

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 months free
Try for £0.00
£8.99/mo thereafter. Renews automatically. Terms apply. Offer ends 31 July 2025 at 23:59 GMT.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Beneath the Cypress Tree

By: Margaret Pemberton
Narrated by: Louiza Patikas
Try for £0.00

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Offer ends 31 July 2025 23:59 GMT. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £13.99

Buy Now for £13.99

Confirm Purchase
Pay using card ending in
Switch payment method
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.
Cancel

About this listen

A war that could turn friends into enemies, lovers into fighters....

Summer 1935. Best friends Kate Shelton, Ella Tetley and Daphne St. Maur are on the cusp of a new life, having graduated with classics degrees.

Kate is desperate to start work on an archaeological dig straightaway, and she is thrilled to be given a position at the famous Knossos palace site in Crete. However, she doesn't bargain for working with gruff site director Lewis Sinclair - nor for her own complex feelings towards him.

In Yorkshire, Ella's family expect her to marry Sam, her steady friend who is training to be a doctor, but Ella too feels pulled to the Mediterranean by the promise of freedom. When she meets Christos, life as a country GP's wife seems even less appealing....

Daphne, however, throws herself into London's high society, falling madly in love with diplomat and heir Sholto Hertford - but then his work brings them to Crete, and Daphne becomes enchanted by the island as well.

Meanwhile, the threat of war rumbles on, as reports of Hitler's rapid expansion across Europe become impossible to ignore. It seems that nothing can touch the perfect, glittering sea and snow-capped mountains, but Kate, Ella and Daphne know that the island haven they now call home will never be the same again.

©2017 Margaret Pemberton (P)2017 Macmillan Digital Audio 20th Century Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Historical Fiction Romance England War

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Summer in Greece cover art
The Angel Tree cover art
Whisper at Dawn cover art
The Girl on the Beach cover art
Escape by Moonlight cover art
Echoes from a Distant Land cover art
The Kirilov Star cover art
The Daughters of Ironbridge cover art
Summer at the Lake cover art
Voyage of Innocence cover art
When the Lion Feeds cover art
The Wildflower Path cover art
Tell it to the Skies cover art
An Italian Affair cover art
The Secrets of Ashmore Castle cover art
The Start of Something Wonderful cover art
All stars
Most relevant  
Seared into early school memory was the commandment never to use the word ‘nice’ when writing, but nice is what this audiobook was. Nice characters and a nice enough story to keep one listening (always hoping for a bit more juice).

The book’s description led me to believe there would be more of the book set either in the war or more richly drawing on historical detail that would be woven into the story to form the main arc of the book. However, the war was rather tacked on very much towards the latter stages of the book.

I’d like to have learnt more - a personal preference - for any novel rooted in real events.

What was included was indeed interesting and doubtless well-researched, but as with the book overall, it needed a bit more heft to elevate it from nice to lovely. Both words might conjure more that’s saccharine than I intend, or that is fair to this book, which has more body than anything so sickly sweet.

Lovely, was another virtually heretical word teachers sternly guided us from using in any writing. But for all the wish-washy flaccidity of either descriptor, I think both nice and lovely have their place. And this book is, in this reader’s/listener’s opinion, nice, which is one rung down from lovely.

A whiling away pleasant distraction rather than an itching to get back to carry on sort of listen.

Nice

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
After listening to A Season of Secrets by the same author I was disappointed to find this on a par but nowhere near as gripping. It was irritating to find that all the main characters had the sleekest, curliest, red, blonde Raven black hair, navy eyes (really?) black eyes or the greenest eyes you've ever seen. The narrator did a fair job with the accents of which there were many. Very predictable.

Worth a listen/read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
What a lovely heartfelt, and intricate story of love, loss and war. I really enjoyed the characters, and the narration was brilliant.

Thoroughly enjoyed listening!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Really enjoyed listening to Beneath the Cypress Tree. The narrator really brought it to life.

Superb!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I read this book after finishing ‘A season of Secrets’, which I loved and couldn’t put down . This book didn’t have the same epic quality and although I enjoyed, it was a bit too predictable for my liking.

A light summer read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Marvellous reading of a griping tale of an archeological investigation, a love of history, a passion for Crete and it's history and people plus some fabulously constructed characters that make you care for their every move. Lovely!!

Sweeping tale of passionate WW2 archeologists!!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Real lovely story so interesting. A good read for a lot of people who like lo e stories

The tree

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
OK for lovers of Mills & Boon! Very repetitive and the many love scenes were dreadful...whoever the lovers were his eyes were always smouldering with desire, she was always crushed in his arms and swept away to unimaginable and delicious heights of ecstasy! Ridiculous coincidences throughout - I mean how likely is it that 3 friends from the same university course would end up on the same Greek island during WW2 and their respective lovers/husbands would end up there too. I don't like leaving bad reviews and try hard to find something positive to say but I'm struggling this time. The best I can say is that the experience of the war on Crete was ok, it retained my interest better than any other part of the story. But overall, don't waste your time or money.

As for the narration, not too bad but Daphne's voice was absolutely appalling! True towards the end it had improved somewhat but for too much of the book, rather than a member of the aristocracy, poor Daphne sounded like a coarse, demented fish wife!

Trite and Repetitive

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I really enjoyed this book but for some reason the book when i got about 7 hours in started at the last chapter of the book. When it got the end of the last chapter it then began at hour 8 on chapter on. its like they put the last chapter in the middle of the audiobook. This really ruined my enjoyment of the book!! :(

I really enjoyed this book until...

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.