PETER NICHOLS'S SECOND NOVEL, "The Rocks," seems on the face of things to be an irresistibly sunny beach book. Most of it is set in the brightly lit Mediterranean, amid old olive groves and sexual intrigue, music and wine and beautiful women. But this sparkling surface glides and washes over quite a bit of disturbing darkness: A teenage girl's virginity is casually taken by a drunken middle-aged layabout; a teenage boy loses his virginity to a 70-year-old woman; those ancient olive groves are decimated by a secret betrayal. None of this depravity reverberates over the course of the novel; it all happens and, just as quickly, is past. "The Rocks" is a tragic double romance, told in reverse, primarily set on Mallorca. Superficially, it's a sort of mash-up of Jim Crace's "Being Dead" and Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins." It begins in 2005 and runs back through time all the way to 1948, retracing the events precipitated by the novel's "inciting incident," whose final repercussion opens the book. This might sound confusing, but it isn't, because Nichols has a firm grasp of the chronology and a clear sense of control over the novel's trajectory and purpose: to illuminate the wreckage of romantic love and the end of a marriage, and, finally, to reveal the mystery at the heart of its death. The marriage in question was a shortlived, long-ago idyll between two of the main characters. Lulu is a sort of ageless, cold but captivating sprite, a free-spirited cipher, both witch and nymph, Circe and Calypso. In other words, she's more of a (sex) symbol than a real woman. In the opening passage, she is described thus: "In her ninth decade, Lulu Davenport still had the slim, supple body of a much younger woman. ... She walked everywhere, she gardened, and she ran Villa Los Roques - 'The Rocks,' as everyone called her little seaside hotel at the eastern end of the island of Mallorca - and charmed her guests as she had for more than 50 years." Her ex-husband, Gerald Rutledge, is a former sailor whose intended Odyssey of a voyage was cut short: "During the war and after, Gerald sailed all over the Mediterranean, between Alexandria and Gibraltar, in every kind and size of watercraft. ... Once he'd lost his own vessel in the waters off Mallorca, Gerald had been effectively marooned" on this small island, seemingly in thrall to his ex-wife, whose presence he's avoided as assiduously as she's avoided his. Gerald's book about his nautical adventures, "The Way to Ithaca," decades out of print, is reissued in 1995 with a brand-new subtitle: "A Sailor's Discovery of the Route of Homer's 'Odyssey.'" During his speech at the book party in London, Gerald dissolves into an attack of weeping that's so violent, at first I thought he was having a stroke. But I'm getting ahead of myself - or maybe I should say behind myself. In the opening scene, in 2005, the ex-spouses, now in their 80s, have coexisted without speaking a word to each other for some 60 years. They run into each other at the market, an encounter charged with ancient hostility and bitterness so intense, they end up tumbling off a cliff to their deaths in the Mediterranean Sea. The question driving the engine of the novel backward is: Why? What in the world happened between them to bring them to this? And secondarily, why are Lulu's son, Luc, and Gerald's daughter, Aegina, also seemingly caught in an ill-fated but inescapable gravitational field of mutually unrequited love? Toward the midway point, when the feckless but well-intentioned Luc tells a group of passengers on a distressed boat, "People are always getting into trouble on boats," my growing suspicion was clinched that this novel has an autobiographical back story. Most novels do, of course, but this one telegraphs itself too loudly and clearly to ignore; it feels as if there's a Shakespearean play within a play here, but in this case, the real story illuminates the fictional one. The novel's slippery quality and muted emotions struck me as a kind of private stocktaking, the author's personal inquiry or catharsis disguised as plot turns. ON A HUNCH, out of intrigued curiosity, I picked up a copy of Nichols's riveting 1997 memoir, "Sea Change." In it, he sets off alone across the Atlantic in his beloved 27-foot wooden engineless sailboat, Toad, which he and his (now ex-) wife had lived on for six years, fixing it up, making it into their home, sharing adventures on it. It's the only thing they own between them, and he's sailing it from England to Maine to sell it. While the boat makes its way across the ocean, Nichols travels back into the past. Over the course of his solitary, star-crossed voyage, he retraces his marriage, tries to figure out what happened, why it failed. He finds his ex-wife's diaries in a duffel bag and reads parts of them. At the end, the boat springs a leak and finally sinks. He's saved, but with the irrevocable loss of their boat comes the knowledge that their marriage is truly over. The epigraph to "Sea Change" comes from "The Cevennes Journal," by Robert Louis Stevenson: "A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best." As I read, I had a series of "aha!" moments; the parallels between Nichols's own life and marriage and those of his fictional characters were deeply satisfying to uncover. Nichols, like his character Luc, grew up partially on Mallorca, the son of divorced parents. Like the novel's secondary lovers, Luc and Aegina, Nichols and his ex-wife met as children on the island, and their own romance failed, in part, because of their inability to transcend their childhood knowledge of each other and become adults together. The memoir, like the novel, contains a precipitous nautical elopement, dope smuggling in Morocco and a young wife held hostage by pirates. People getting into trouble, both on boats and in marriages, might be said to be the common theme between the two books. "The Rocks" proceeds from 2005 back through 1995, 1983, 1970, 1966, 1956, 1951, until, finally, we reach the beginning in 1948, the truth of what happened between Gerald and Lulu. On the way we learn the story of their (unrelated) children, Luc and Aegina, the novel's other romantic pair; Luc is the only child from Lulu's brief second marriage, and Aegina is the daughter of Gerald and a native Mallorcan. The enduring, festering enmity between their parents confers a certain Romeo and Juliet-like tension to their growing love, but its failure to thrive has, in the end, nothing to do with their parents' own doomed passion. The zooming-back-through-time strategy creates an oddly propulsive momentum - "oddly" because we turn the pages hoping to find out not what happens but what's already happened. From the outset, the characters' fates have been sealed by time. This somehow has the effect of forestalling melodrama, creating a distance between the characters and the reader that feels appropriately Greek. And if the ending feels slightly anticlimactic after all the complex interpersonal mystery that's gone before, the epigraph, from Cavafy's poem "Ithaka," has already prepared us: "As you set out for Ithaka/hope the voyage is a long one,/full of adventure, full of discovery." The point isn't to arrive in Ithaca, it's the journey itself, and any wealth you reap is in the experience of getting there. This, Nichols seems to be implying, is true of novels and marriages as well as ocean voyages. KATE CHRISTENSEN'S most recent books are the novel "The Astral" and the food memoir "Blue Plate Special."

Nichols (Voyage to the North Star) has conjured the perfect beach read: a romantic story set in a rich beach town on Mallorca called Cala Marsopa. Though you may not get sand between its easy-to-turn pages, you'll feel as though you have. Lulu Davenport, a lithe and headstrong beauty, is the doyenne of Villa Los Roques, a resort dubbed The Rocks by the English expatriate layabouts who return annually each summer. The book opens in 2005, in Lulu's "ninth decade," when a surprise encounter with her estranged first husband, Gerald Rutledge, awakens "a flame of old anger." Gerald gave up his sailing life and made a permanent home in Cala Marsopa following their brief marriage, though they have managed to avoid each other almost completely for nearly 60 years. Nichols crafts the story in reverse, moving back through time and revealing that even though these former lovers have had little contact, they have left deep imprints on each other. Meanwhile, another story of love, separation, and the "horrible, stunting gap between dream and desire and practicality" is revealed through the deeply intertwined lives of Lulu's and Gerald's respective children: Luc Franklin, the son of an American father and raised in Paris, himself a summer-only resident of The Rocks, and Aegina, the dark-eyed daughter of Gerald and a local. The two central stories engage the readers' sympathies and emotions, while Nichols colors in the background with the indelible imagery of the wind-swept Mediterranean, and the louche exploits of the careless adults and the tanned teenagers who can slip effortlessly from English to Spanish to French, but have a harder time growing up beyond the endless summer. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

The lives and loves of expatriates on Mallorca, shaped by a 60-year-old misunderstanding. Nichols' novel opens in 2005 with a chance meeting between Lulu Davenport and Gerald Rutledge on a cliff-top road near The Rocks, Lulu's seaside hotel. Though they live in the same small town on an island, the couple has managed to avoid each other since their very brief marriage in the 1940s, and this encounter immediately becomes a confrontation. In its course, the pair of 80-somethings accidentally tumble to their deaths. The remaining sections of the novelset in 1995, 1983, 1970, 1966, 1956, 1951, and 1948trace backward through the ripple effects of their falling-out to the incident that started it all, sweeping into the vortex their children by other spouses, and the generation after that as well. As intoxicating as a long afternoon sitting at the bar at The Rocks, the book features complications that include a book deal, a real estate swindle, a shipwreck, a drug bust, and many sexual affairs, including a couple of statutory rapes. All of it is absolutely riveting, leaving the reader desperate to depart immediately for swoony Mallorca, depicted from the time no one knew where it was (one would-be visitor goes to Monaco by mistake) to its present-day popularity. Nichols' expertise on everything from the Odyssey to olive oil to classic movies enriches the story, as does his profound understanding of his screwed-up cast of characters. "They were self-employed professionals, artists, writers, nonviolent sweet-natured criminals, mysteriously self-supporting or genteelly impoverished,....occasionally sleeping with one another in a manner that disturbed no one. In unspoken ways, they recognized one another, and everything they did made perfect sense to them, though they often arrived on the island as pariahs of the outside world, but were soothed and taken in by their steady, tolerant, and nonjudgmental friends and lovers on Mallorca." A literary island vacation with a worldly, wonderfully salacious storyteller. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Set chiefly on Mallorca, this languorous novel begins in 2005 with a freak accident that kills British octogenarians Lulu Davenport and Gerald Rutledge. The story then travels in reverse all the way back to 1948, when Lulu and Gerald were briefly married. Following their split, the staunchly self-reliant Lulu buys and presides for more than 50 years over a hotel called Villa los Roques the Rocks. Gerald, meanwhile, uses the proceeds from his book, which recounts his navigation of Odysseus' route, to buy a small farm where he ekes out a living manufacturing olive oil. The travels of Odysseus are a recurring motif, and the novel's pages are liberally salted with references to Homer and The Odyssey. In later marriages, Lulu has a son, Luc, and Gerald has a daughter, Aegina; these two bob in and out of each other's lives. As the book voyages deeper into the past, each section adds another layer, until readers finally learn what caused Lulu and Gerald's rift. The proceedings are enriched by a sharply drawn cast of secondary players. Nichols deftly melds comedy and compassion, and his rendering of his Mediterranean setting will have readers packing their bags. Recommend this to readers who enjoy the novels of Jane Gardam.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2010 Booklist

Nichols's (Voyage to the North Star) tale begins in 2005, at Lulu's 80th birthday party. With her long white hair, the lithe, beautiful proprietress of Villa Los Roques still appears robust, although a recent stroke has affected her brain. By chance, she encounters Gerald, her ex-husband, whom for years she has managed to avoid despite both being residents of the small island of Mallorca. They exchange words; they scuffle; they plunge off a cliff and drown. What a stunning start to this novel, which proceeds, section by section, to go back in time, examining their doomed love story and the equally dismal relationship between her son, Luc, and Gerald's daughter, Aegina. The problem is that Lulu is mostly unlikable. She has very little use for her son, she carries grudges, she is uncommunicative. Although she comes across to her guests as Meryl Streep's character in Mamma Mia!, there's something disturbed about Lulu. VERDICT Although there are similarities, this title is not Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, and readers hoping for another winsome, humorous, hopeful love story will be disappointed. Nichols has written more of a tragedy, with the only glimmer of light coming in the final pages. However, the lovely Mallorca backdrop may be enough to satisfy some.-Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.