The seed for The Cyprus Chronicles was planted over two decades ago, when I received a grant as an undergraduate to travel to Cyprus and collect stories from people who had lived through extraordinary times.

To me, these stories transcended genre. Part great adventure, part tragedy, part black comedy, they were stories I wanted to tell, not through the dry lens of history, but with eyes for deeply personal narratives that, paradoxically, can only be drawn out through fiction.

What I’m reading: General Grivas was the leader of the armed campaign against the British in Cyprus from 1955 to 1959.

Book 1 of the Cyprus Chronicles novels, August in the Vanishing City takes place in the mid 1990s, in those years when I was first beginning my research. The mood I sensed at that time—at least among Greek Cypriots—was primarily one of cynicism, bitterness, fear and futility. The coup of 1974 and the subsequent Turkish invasion had driven a stake through the heart of a centuries-old nationalist dream of union with motherland Greece. The Kabuki theater of dead-end negotiations between the internationally recognized but politically impotent Greek Cypriots and the isolated, militarized Turkish proxy “state” of Northern Cyprus (a “state” controlled not just by Turkey but by radical right-wing, deep-state forces within it) seemed as pointless as ever.

In the novel, the main character, a young Greek Cypriot, goes on a quest to recover a precious heirloom that connects to the past—but more importantly to figure out how to find personal meaning amidst the tenuous, unjust reality he finds himself in.

Now I’m working on Book 2, with the working title, The Kyrenia Road. This story goes backward, to the 1950s, when the Greek Cypriot population staged a guerrilla campaign to liberate Cyprus from the British Empire. The novel, like the story of the campaign itself, is one of audacity and courage, heroism and sacrifice, but also of bitterness and irony.

In his book, The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, the great writer Lawrence Durrell wrote:

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made … They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well.

Alas, Durrell was an imperialist, and his memoir of Cyprus was at heart a patronizing apology for the inexcusable behavior of his country.

My story, though fiction, is, by contrast, the story of the underdog who stood up to an unjust ruler against overwhelming odds, with ripples that are still reverberating through the lives of individuals and the history of the region.

Stay tuned …