Three countries, three decades, three love potions – intertwined within an Art Nouveau villa, a gateway to past secrets and newfound guilt. Beginning in Boston in 2001 at an artist's triumphant solo exhibition, the story flashes back to the millennium summer on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, where friendly couples buy an enchanting villa before the men get stranded on a rocky island.
When they return, they must navigate unexpected trials as their wives pursue new life decisions or creative paths. Keeping the villa now seems impossible. Little do they know, it hides records that could rewrite their future. The tragic love story of a royal officer and a crown princess in the 1920s and the journey of a feisty woman whose daughter disappears in 1945 as she leaves her homeland, the kingdom of Bulgaria, vanishing behind the Iron Curtain.
Back in Boston. While critics hail the artist's talent for creating spectacular, color-saturated canvases, her career, marriage, and finances crumble. Determined to save her family's historic house and her psychiatrist husband's reputation during his court trial in Europe, she must care for her daughter without a steady income. After she demands that her former lover support her passion project, she promises him one night in return. Restoring the house and obtaining financing are both part of the project. This depends on tracking down her missing best friend, whom she had put forward to a wealthy sponsor to adapt his memoir into a novel. Now trapped in a love triangle and a deepening financial crisis, she must find a way forward as the conflict between love, legacy, and survival compels her to question her deepest beliefs while her reputation hangs in the balance.
Told through the lens of multiple narrators, “Thirty Grains of Love” is an endearing tale about the feeling of life halfway through, the taste of freedom, and the allure of temptation. It winds its way from Southern Europe to England and North America, immersing the reader in the dynamics between men and women who shape the modern world to unveil the sources of power and love.
Set against the backdrop of history and generational echoes of secrecy and social limitations, it also explores the route to happiness and its price across four marriage models—trad wife, double career, open relationship, and unequal income. An uplifting story with a dual timeline that poses the question: a hundred years after Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, have all their dreams been fulfilled? Is finding true love and pursuing one's true calling getting any easier?
The Sea Moves On
Three countries, three centuries, three potions of love.
Friendly couples buy an enchanting Art Nouveau villa before the men get stranded on a tiny rocky island. Upon their return, they need to save their reputation, means of existence, and love. The road to revelation will be determined both by their choices and the past.
In 1945, Axenia leaves a country to vanish behind the iron curtain when her daughter disappears. Establishing a successful business abroad, she never gives up the hope to return and find her little girl.
The tragic love story of a royal officer and a crown princess takes place in 1922. The house, a gateway to past secrets and new guilt, helps the characters to find their true self while solving the puzzles of the past.