The Witch of Portobello is the fictional, yet quite realistic story of Athena, a young woman born and given up to an orphanage in Romania, adopted by a well-situated Lebanese couple, raised in Beirut, who finally seeks refuge and settles in London. Readers are clued up from the beginning about Athena's death, so the actual storyline is told by people 'who knew her well – or hardly at all'. The plot is documentary-like, which adds a purposeful authenticity. We can get to know this woman through the eyes of others, through memories of her fateful existence, which brings an extra touch of mysteriousness to her intricate persona.

The major protagonists include: The storyteller - whose identity is well- hidden till the end: 'No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind the door: the purpose of light is to create more light, to open people's eyes, to reveal the marvels around. No-one sacrifices the most important thing she possesses: love. No-one places her dreams in the hands of those who might destroy them. No-one, that is, but Athena.' There's a sceptical journalist who's fallen in love with her as a woman: 'anything science cannot explain has no right to exist'.

A curious actress becomes her object of induction into the use of supernatural powers: 'When we venture into that unfamiliar sea, we trust blindly in those who guide us, believing that they know more than we do.' There's a female doctor, her mentor and advisor, her initiator into the encounter with the Great Mother: 'Don't confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself ... the physical world and the spiritual world are the same thing. We can see the Divine in each speck of dust, but that doesn't stop us wiping it away with a wet sponge. The Divine doesn't disappear; it's transformed into the clean surface.' Her adoptive mother suffers as she watches her searching for her true identity: 'When fate is very generous with us, there is always a well into which all our dreams can tumble'.

Her ex-husband knew her as a strong-willed girl, turned into a loving wife and mother: 'how many of us will be saved the pain of seeing the most important things in our lives disappearing from one moment to the next? I don't just mean people, but our ideas and dreams too: we might survive a day, a week, a few years, but we're all condemned to lose. Our body remains alive, yet, sooner or later, our soul will receive the mortal blow. The perfect crime - for we don't know who murdered our joy, what their motives were or where the guilty parties are to be found.'

Her Polish landlord introduced her to the idea known as the Vertex and invited her to become part of a group dancing on the sounds of percussion, in search of a meaning to life: 'music and rituals to induce in people a kind of intoxicated state that brought them into contact with both the best and the worst in themselves ... Vertex ... it's the culminating point, the goal of all those who, like everyone else, make mistakes, but who, even in their darkest moments, never lose sight of the light emanating from their hearts.... The Vertex is hidden inside us, and we can reach it if we accept it and recognise its light.' There's her biological mother, whom she searches for to find out why a woman is capable of abandoning her own child: 'Thousands of questions filled my head.... but I wasn't the one who had travelled the world in search of her, on the contrary. I wasn't there to ask questions, but to answer them.'