Now, Lili Bita’s long-awaited memoir, “Sister of Darkness,” has appeared from Boston’s Somerset Hall Press. In it, she tells the story of her birth and childhood on the idyllic island of Zante (Zakynthos), a childhood shattered first by the Italian and German occupation, then by civil war, and finally by the great earthquake that destroyed the island and its centuries-old culture. “Zakynthos was the most beautiful of islands,” Lili says. “I knew from an early age that I would have to leave it, but also that I would always carry it with me. And I have.”

The daughter of a Greek army general from Epirus and a Zakynthian painter and poet, Lili calls her heritage “a marriage of island and earth.” “But I needed the sky, too,” she recalls. “And though the sky over Zakynthos was very beautiful, I knew it would always be the same sky. I needed more stars than it could hold.”