The dorm and the drachma

Two of the series share a building. In The Keystone Cycle it is a converted sponge merchant's house in Pothia, on Kalymnos, where five Greek diaspora teenagers spend two years of a four-year exchange programme before the programme sends each of them on to the country their own family left: Tarpon Springs, Darwin, Sfax, Alexandria, Broome.

It is a dormitory in the way a boarding house is a dormitory. Five bedrooms, a common room with a piano under a tarp, and a storage room that nobody has properly emptied since the house stopped being a business. That storage room is where the plots start. A ledger in one book. A parish marriage record from 1908 in another. A stack of letters labelled in Sfax-Greek in a third.

Why a merchant's house is full of paper

Because a sponge merchant was a banker whether he wanted to be or not.

The trade ran on advances. A boat went out on money that did not exist yet, against a catch nobody had seen, and the merchant who fronted it kept the account. Multiply that by every boat in a harbour across sixty years and the building fills up with the only record anybody kept of who owed what to whom. When the trade ended, the boats were sold and the paper stayed, because paper is not worth carrying out.

The awkward part about the money

Here is the thing that surprises readers, and it is the reason a cache turns up in so many of these books.

For most of the twentieth century a Greek family with savings had good reasons not to keep them in a Greek bank, and the reasons kept arriving. Occupation. Hyperinflation that made a currency into wallpaper. A civil war. A currency reform. Then another one. A household that had been through two of those did not need a third to learn the lesson. Money got kept as something that survives a government: gold, sovereigns, foreign notes, a deed, jewellery that is really an investment wearing a disguise.

Which means the family record and the family savings were frequently the same object, hidden in the same place, and known to one person.

That is a gift to a novelist and a catastrophe for an actual family. One death and the knowledge is gone. What is left is a house, a box, and a grandchild holding a document that is either a map or a receipt, with no living person able to say which.

The distinction worth keeping straight

Things Left Open is the adult series. Five heirs, five cities, and in each one a document somebody already wants badly enough to pay too much for.

The Keystone Cycle is the quieter one, and it is about teenagers. Nobody in it is an heir yet. They are seventeen and eighteen, they are in a house that is not theirs, and the paper they find is about people they will never meet. Each book stands alone. They read richer as a cycle.