Mary Ray is best known as the author of the Roman Empire Sequence (A Tent for the Sun, The Ides of April, Sword Sleep, Beyond the Desert Gate, and Rain From the West), but she wrote several remarkable novels set in other periods, including four about the Aegean world of the bronze age. Song of Thunder tells the story of the eruption of Thera around 1600 BCE, and imagines its effect on those who survive and on the world they live in.

The central character is a young poet-singer named Kenofer, who lives with his family on the island they call Kallisté (Thera, modern Santorini). The Governor’s hostility to Kenofer’s family stands in the way of his pursuing his craft, but a devastating earthquake rescues him from imprisonment, and in the chaos that follows he flees the island along with other refugees for “The Great Island” (Crete). There he is able to study with the poet known as the Master, finds his sister Theano (who separately fled Thera), and is befriended by Prince Geryon and his son Asterion. 

Five years later, Kenofer (now a famous singer who is losing his sight), his sister (who must guide him), and Asterion (who has been forced to leave Crete) return to Kallisté. But the island is uninhabitable and the three and those with them flee to Achaea (Greece), from which (high on a rock) they see and survive the dramatic volcanic eruption and the equally destructive tidal wave that follows it. Learning of the devastation of Crete, they settle at the court of the king and queen of Sparta to start a new life. 

Although Kenofer is the central character this is also Theano’s story and Asterion’s, told from their point of view as well. Drawing on the archaeological and geological findings that – with traces in Greek myth - are all we have for this period, Ray creates a convincing picture of the Minoan kingdom of Crete, the world it dominated, and the eruption that changed everything. – Deborah Roberts