The Thread by Victoria Hislop - review

Victoria Hislop champions the reading requirements of the comfy trouser brigade. Her novels are family sagas, cast over multiple generations, with some tragedy and romance thrown in and set amid a fast-moving historical background. With The Island - first published in 2005 - the winning formula was the Second World War and a leper colony on a Greek island. It sold one million copies here alone - kerching! Next came The Return, a combination of flamenco dancing and the horrors of the Spanish Civil war. Not quite so successful.

This time Hislop, wife of Ian, has returned to Greece and its second largest city, the port of Thessaloniki. The same structure is wheeled out: the story opens in the present day (well, 2007 - the present day really would make it more interesting), the narrative takes the reader back in time to 1917 and the drama unfolds through the years.

The central characters are Dimitri, son of a ruthless fabric merchant, and Katerina, a refugee who is a whizz with a needle and who lost her mother in the chaos of war, ending up in Thessaloniki with a stranger and her twin daughters.

The prose is often gushing and clichéd - the sea shimmers, buildings are "razed to the ground" (on three occasions) and hearts are torn apart, but Hislop, mistress of mum-lit, kept me turning the pages, all 390 of them. Because the real star of the book is Thessaloniki, considered to be Greece's cultural capital with its history dating back 2,300 years, and she taps into the plight of its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants in the first half of the 20th century for some gritty emotion.

Somehow it doesn't seem to matter that many of her plot lines end up as dead ends, and others are about as subtle as the size of Greece's debt. Stuck with a fat old husband, one of the characters plies him with rich food "nurturing the perfect environment for coronary failure". A few lines later, Hislop describes her "furring up the arteries " Yes, okay, Victoria, we've got the picture. On the next page, surprise, surprise, he dies, in flagrante, freeing his wife to pursue her true love.

The overall effect of The Thread is like eating baklava - moreish but overly sweet. For an author who studied English at Oxford, even the final five-word sentence could be one of those life mottos found hand- sewn onto a cushion in a craft shop.

Nevertheless, her fans will love it, as will the Thessaloniki tourist board. It's a suitable Christmas present for your shire-bound mother and just what we have come to expect from a woman whose husband recently told Radio 4 listeners: "I have never worn jeans."