A tale of love and division moves between postcolonial Cyprus and London, exploring themes of generational trauma and belonging “The feeling of being ‘in between things’ is good for [writers],” said Elif Shafak in a 2014 interview. This delight in liminal spaces forms the bedrock of her 12th novel, which charts the moving story of Kostas and Defne Kazantzakis, young lovers in a painfully divided postcolonial Cyprus – one Greek and Christian, the other Turkish and Muslim – and the emotional price they continue to pay after moving to England. Early on, Shafak hits us with a perfect juxtaposition of beauty and violence, imagining the day when two corpses, lost in a well, “swim toward the chink of sky overhead, shimmering in the refracted sunlight”. In a London scene, anthropologist Defne and her colleague interview an elderly Cypriot for his war memories but are chased away by the man’s son for invading his privacy. Sheltering in a pub, “both women were laughing so hard … the other customers began to look … no one imagining it was pain they were setting free”. The book is stuffed full of such transitional experiences, where joy and beauty are under threat, or on their way to becoming something else entirely. Continue reading...
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