A breath-taking novel that digs into the unhealed wounds of Turkish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974, recounting a “small” human story embedded in the “big”, though unvoiced, History, where memory is crushed between the vicious millstones of debt and time.
After the invasion, 18-year-old Chloe remains trapped with her mother in Lapithos, where she is repeatedly raped by a Turkish man. She soon becomes pregnant but instead of dropping it, she abstains from the mass abortion wave of that time and decides to give birth to the “enemy”.
Forty-three years later, Chloe decides to face the ghosts of her past. She staggers in Athens Airport, a broken woman, unable to decide whether she will go to the departure gate to Istanbul, where her rapist now lives. Will she manage to take the step that will finally mark her coming of age? Will she acquire redemption?
A fierce novel that moves towards collective memory and the voicing of Cyprus historical tragedy through fiction.
Kastaniotis, 2020, 384 P.
