Books from Cyprus

A Greek Cypriot boy and a Turkish Cypriot girl fall in love in 1970s Cyprus, meeting secretly beneath a fig tree in a tavern as ethnic tensions threaten to tear their world apart. Decades later, in London, their daughter Ada struggles with grief and a past her parents have never fully revealed. As family secrets emerge, a fig tree growing in their garden becomes a living connection to a homeland left behind. Narrated partly through the tree itself, this moving novel explores displacement, inherited trauma, forbidden love, and the fragile bonds between people, nature, and memory.

Can you be whole when your world is in halves? Twenty-one-year-old Daniela travels from England to Cyprus in search of her roots and a stronger sense of identity. Staying at her grandparents’ home, she becomes increasingly aware of the pain her family carries from Turkey’s 1974 invasion of northern Cyprus. The island’s division is not merely political: it has shaped family memories, personal relationships, and the ways people understand their own histories. When Daniela’s aunt invites her across the border for a picnic, Daniela unexpectedly encounters Beyza, her former girlfriend. Five years earlier, the two women had lived in London, sharing a connection that seemed possible beyond the boundaries of their cultural backgrounds. Now, with Daniela in the Greek Cypriot south and Beyza in the Turkish Cypriot north, their reunion forces them to confront the religious, cultural, and political differences that separate them. As Daniela navigates her feelings for Beyza and the complicated history of her family, she begins to question what it means to belong to a place, a culture, or another person. Through the parallel divisions of a family and an island, Love and Only Water explores sexuality, cultural identity, inherited trauma, and the uncertainty of living between worlds.