Catching up
The best travelogue is still Colin Thubron’s Journey into Cyprus (1; Penguin), an account of a three-month trek around the island during 1972, with excursions into history and encounters with locals on the eve of the big bust-up. Bitter Lemons (2) by Lawrence Durrell is a lyrical memoir of his spell as an English teacher, minor colonial official and bohemian resident of Bellapais, near Kyrenia, during the rise of the anti-colonial organisation EOKA in the mid-1950s.
Brushing up
The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish Invasion (3) by Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig is a remarkably coherent presentation of the long-standing theory that Cyprus’ integrity was sacrificed to maintain the strategic worth of the island to Nato and the US. In The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (4; University of Pennsylvania Press), Rebecca Bryant, an American anthropologist, shows how the main barriers to reunification are not the physical walls that came down in 2003 but the ones in islanders’ heads.
Winding down
Sheila Hawkins’ trilogy, Back of Beyond, Beyond our Dreams and Beyond Compare (5-7; Kyriakou Books), chronicling the life of a naïve expat and her husband putting down roots in a remote village of the Akamas peninsula, is light beach reading, easily available on the island.
In Margarita’s Husband: A Fable of the Levant (8), by Andriana Ierodiaconou (Armida Publications), the husband, Homer, pillar of society, is overwhelmed by events, amour fou and family tragedy in the 1920s. Low-key prose and a soupçon of magical realism make for a surprise page-turner.
Ledra Street (9) by Nora Nadjarian (Armida Publications) – a Limassol Armenian best known for her poetry – is a collection of short stories exploring love, adultery, the diaspora experience, racism and family crises. The Cypriot (10), by Andreas Koumi (Dexter Haven Publishing), tells the story of a tailor grimly self-exiled in 1970s Britain, shunning his turbulent village past, which is revealed slowly in flashback. It’s heavily indebted to Louis de Bernières’ Aegean epics, and with an ending that strains credulity, but still essential reading.
