Few civilisations have been as enshrouded in mystery and imbued by imagination as the Minoans. They wrote in a language no one has yet managed to decipher. In a world long associated with warriors and violent battles, their murals depict peaceful, beautiful scenes of swirling sea life, birds and flowers, and of women gathering saffron on hill tops, all in breathtaking burgundies and blues. The name we call them was invented by a Victorian archaeologist consumed by his fascination with a savage myth. We don’t even know their real name.

These ancient people, about whom we know so little, continue to cast a spell over us. Each year, I start my Year Eight Latin course with the Minoans, and the children are intrigued by the Phaistos Disk, the palace at Knossos, and the bull leaping fresco. The grizzly story of the Minotaur and its maze which so enthralled Arthur Evans continues to capture their young minds, and I too remember finding this story powerful as a child.

Over time, though, it is the murals of women with baskets of flowers, and the plant paintings which I have come to be most drawn to. Simple scenes of young girls picking flowers are not as crowd-pleasing as young athletes somersaulting over fearsome bulls, but they convey an ordinary beauty and pattern of daily life that is enchanting in its own way.

The Saffron Gatherers fresco has always been my favourite. The scene appears to show a younger woman looking up towards an older one, to see if she is doing the picking in the right way. There is something familiar, clumsy, teenage, about the way her legs are positioned. This ancient scene seems to capture a dynamic that many will recognise, between a mother and a daughter, one trying to please the other, while also pushing to be her own person, to make her own mistakes.

It is this mural, and this tension, which form the basis of my new novel, Flower Gatherers. The painting, and its suggestion of the relationship between a mother and daughter, appears in three different timeframes within the novel, though there are two ‘main’ narratives. One is set in ancient times, imagining the life of a young flower-gathering girl, her journey of growing up, leaving her maternal home, and encountering the sacred roles of harvesting flowers within a priesthood of gatherers.

Alongside this, in the present day, a researcher, who is living in the shadow of a terrible personal tragedy, is attempting to decipher tablets which might reveal powerful new information about this ancient world. As the two narratives develop, they begin to intertwine across time, with each one taking on the part of one of the women in the mural itself: the older one, lost in her work, familiar and predictable, the younger one, learning what it means to grow up, with all the wonder and confusion that holds.

Both the storyline set in Minoan times, and the contemporary researcher’s discoveries, are not intended to be historically accurate. They imagine elements of this society and discoveries which may eventually come to light, inspired by a layperson’s knowledge of this era and civilisation. This is in many ways a central theme of the novel: the gaps in our

understanding of ancient history, as well as the gaps in our understanding of each other, the ways in which we yearn to fill these, and the limits of what we can know.

There is also the glimpse of a future where the whole landscape of what we know about this ancient world is profoundly altered, and a suggestion that our familiar world can be transformed in ways we can never fully envisage at the time.

The novel has illustrations in each chapter, created by artist Lydia Hall, which cast key scenes in the book in a Minoan style.

Flower Gatherers is available as hardback, paperback and ebook.