The moonspinners - Mary Stewart

While hiking through the beautiful, desolate hills of Crete, Nicola Ferris stumbles across the prone form of a critically injured man. His name is Mark, and he and his brother Colin are on the run after witnessing a murder. Nicola tends to Mark and insists on joining him in his search for his brother, who vanished after Mark was shot. But hidden in the hills are men who will do anything to make sure that Colin and Mark - and now Nicola - never leave Crete.

Sometimes, when you're deep in countryside, you meet three girls, walking along the hill tracks in the dusk, spinning. They each have a spindle, and onto these they are spinning their wool, milk-white, like moonlight. Night after night, you can see the moon getting less and less, the ball of light waning, while it grows on the spindles of the maidens. Then at length, the moon is gone, and the world has darkness and rest, and the creatures of the hillsides are safe from the hunter...

One of the best known of Mary Stewart's classic romantic thrillers, The Moon-Spinners is set in an extraordinarily well-realised - and incredibly romantic - Crete and features one of her most memorable love stories.