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Songbirds
Christy Lefteri
Novel, 2021
Set in Nicosia, it follows the search for a missing Sri Lankan domestic worker and shows the island's class divides and its migrant labour.
Books set in Cyprus
Four books that put you in Cyprus. Two are by writers from Cyprus and set there: Songbirds and Ledra Street. The other two are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
About the literature of Cyprus
Very little writing from Cyprus has been translated into English, so many readers meet the island through English-language books about its division. Writers there work in Greek, Turkish and English, and the 1974 division, which split Nicosia with a buffer zone, shadows much of what they write. Nora Nadjarian, an Armenian Cypriot, sets the stories of Ledra Street in that divided capital, among the memories of ordinary people. Christy Lefteri's Songbirds, also set in Nicosia, views the island through the disappearance of a Sri Lankan domestic worker.
British writers have also made the island their subject. Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons recounts buying a house in a Kyrenia-range village in the 1950s, as the EOKA campaign and the Emergency took hold. Colin Thubron's Journey into Cyprus has him walking the length of the island in 1972, meeting villagers and monks before partition.
By writers from Cyprus
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Ledra Street
Nora Nadjarian
Short stories, 2006
Short stories from an Armenian Cypriot writer that explore the divided Nicosia, its buffer zone and the memories of ordinary people.
Wider picks
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Cyprus.
Bitter Lemons
Lawrence Durrell
Memoir, 1957
Wider pick: By a British writer who lived on the island for three years
Durrell's memoir of buying a house in a Kyrenia-range village in the 1950s, set against the rise of EOKA and the Emergency.
The Sunrise
Victoria Hislop
Novel, 2012
Wider pick: By a British novelist, closely researched on Famagusta
A novel of Famagusta's glamorous tourist boom and its abrupt end in the 1974 invasion, following Greek and Turkish Cypriot families.
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