WHEN 10-YEAR-OLD Simon Gough visited Majorca in 1953 he thought he had landed in paradise. Far from the misery of his English boarding school and his parents' divorce, he fell in love - with the tiny village of Deya, with his wild cousin Juan and most of all with his beloved 'Grand-Uncle', the famous poet, Robert Graves. 

When he returned in 1960, paradise had been overrun by beatniks and marijuana - and Simon liked it all the more. But he also found himself entangled in a web of love, lies and deceit, playing a game whose rules he didn't understand. 

A mesmerising tale of passion and divided loyalties, set between the magic of bohemian Majorca and the horror of Franco's Madrid - The White Goddess: An Encounter is a haunting evocation of a lost time and place, dominated by the extraordinary power of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.