October 31, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez tr. Megan McDowell #RIPxx

My Cemetery Journeys

Argentinian author Mariana Enríqeuz is known for unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre, amid contemporary Argentina. Her stories are populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts and hungry women walking the troubled line between urban realism and literary horror.

Though I’ve seen her Gothic titles on the International Booker shortlist, an overactive imagination has constrained my curiosity to venture further until now.

When I saw that Granta were publishing a memoir-like collection of essays that chronicle her travels through graveyards of the world, steeped in history, legend and local culture, I was more than intrigued, I wanted to take that journey with Mariana Enriquez as my guide.

One Woman’s Obsession and Another’s

This is not fiction, it’s a journalistic travel diary, beginning with her first teenage encounter in Genoa, Italy, spanning years of visits and curating the experiences that came with them, and a potted history of characters she momentarily became obsessed with while visiting 21 cemeteries across four continents.

I admit that I have my own obsession with cemeteries, though not to visit them or to seek out historical characters; my interest is in the words left behind, the clues that help me recreate a lineage.

I discovered that it is possible to do that online through ‘Find a Grave’, another way to find ancestors and fill in the gaps in a family tree, creating one’s own virtual cemeteries populated with the memorials of those who came before.

Lest we forget or should we never have known and have a compulsion to awaken our soul remembering. I visit these virtual creations, solve some of their mysteries and see into the lives of those forgotten, as if they were there, tapping me on the shoulder inviting me to come and witness how it was.

A Goth Flaneur Coming of Age

From that very first essay about her journey as a 25-year-old to Italy with her mother I was hooked. Mariana Enriquez described herself as a ‘goth‘ from about the age of six years old and in her book, travels to cities and obscure locations around the world with the aim of visiting a place of rest, unravelling stories as she goes.

In her gripping, journalistic style, she shares why each graveyard was important to visit, whether part of an interesting historical aspect, or because of a particular personality, or a rumour about the strange things that allegedly happen there. It surprised me initially that many of these places require security, some even have ticket offices, because strange things can happen in broad daylight as well as the dead of night.

Each essay gives the country and location of the cemetery and the year she visited and sometimes there is a photo of a particularly interesting sculpture. In an NPR interview with Ayesha Rascoe, she expanded on her youthful inclinations and inspiration in seeking out these places of rest.

Reading Edgar Allen Poe – and then with the years, I learned that also cemeteries have a lot to say about life, about the history of the people. And then Argentina in the ’70s, the decade where I was born, had a dictatorship that made a lot of bodies disappear. Therefore, there’s a generation of people that were killed by the government, and they don’t have a grave.

I realized that that trauma, that is very engraved in my life, somehow made me feel that a grave, a tombstone – it’s something of comfort. It’s a final thing in a good way.

Death and the Maiden, Staglieno

So it begins with Death and the Maiden, Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, Genoa in 1997 and this essay is literally the initial seduction into the collection, Mariana’s mother had enough money to take her first trip to Europe and invited her daughter along.

Genoa wasn’t her priority; when read of the places in Italy that were, I’m drawn down literary, art and historical rabbit holes in delight. But Staglieno at least had graves that featured on the cover Joy Division‘s single Love Will Tear Us Apart, even if she had never liked them.

In a public square in Genoa is where she meets the perfect goth boy playing violin, an Italian Englishman, like a creature out of Mary Shelley or Byron. Someone to accompany her on her pilgrimage.

Enzo was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. At least for me, for my idea of beauty, which is shadowy and pale and pliant, black and blue, a little moribund but happy, more dusk than night.

Welsh Immigrants in Patagonia

When Enriquez travels to Trevelin Cemetery in Chubut, Agentina, 2009, I learn about the Welsh who left their homeland to settle in Patagonia in 1865. Having been exploited and discriminated against in the United Kingdom and fearing losing their language and identity, 153 Welsh men, women and children boarded the ship Mimosa and arrived in a place that was something of a disappointment, but became the most significant Welsh colony in Argentine Patagonia.

I learn about characters from this group, the little known history that explains the proliferation of Jones, Thomas and Evans, the foreign words on the gravestones, in a place where many today still speak Welsh.

The Mountains of San Sebastian to Rottnest Island

From English soldiers buried in forest graves on a Basque mountain near San Sebastian in Spain, I read of more minor historical events and wonder about the meaning of the words on the chapel, “Every hour wounds; the last one kills.” So many stories and mystery among the remains.

In 2007, she accompanies her Australian boyfriend Paul who works as a bike mechanic on Rottnest Island, half an hour from Freemantle in Western Australia. A stable, long distance relationship that is headed towards marriage and an outsider’s view of a curious part of the world where the lead singer of AC/DC came of age, went to jail and is buried. She wants to see his grave.

The place has a booming real estate market, houses with yards full of healing crystals and fairies, collectors of all kinds who exhibit their cabinets of curiosities in the streets, artists, musicians, and a sparse but continuously fluctuation itinerant population linked to the port – people who can be unhinged, unstable and on occasion violent.

Weirded out by the hotel-asylum they’re staying in, she takes the ferry to the island, once inhabited by the Noongar Aborginal people, also used as a prison and visits the burial grounds, unearthing more story of post-colonial and indigenous poeples.

Savannah to New Orleans to Cuba to Edinburgh

I don’t wish this make this overly long, because I feel like I could write paragraphs on every essay; they are so interesting, quirky, incredible and speak so much to the different cultures they inhabit, from a very different perspective than what anyone would usually encounter visiting a foreign country.

If you came from New Orleans, I guess you would know about the vibrant characters that inhabit it, both the living and the dead. I did not know that it is the site of the second most visited grave in American after Elvis, that of the 19th century midwife, herbalist and philanthropic Voodoo practitioner of French, Spanish and African origins Marie Laveau.

Then there was the controversy surrounding the Pietro Gualdi marble sculpture of a seated woman in a robe holding a bouquet of flowers that Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda requested permission from the Italian Society to use in the tomb scene of Easy Rider. Suffice to say all requests since then have been denied. And Nicholas Cage’s pyramid? A pharaonoic tomb waiting for a body.

Frankfurt was brief, Cuba was fascinating and macabre and sad after the friend who hosted her became the first close associate whom death claimed. Savannah was touristy and disappointing, I mean how could the book cover of John Berendt’s novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil have caused such havoc and chaos to a place of rest?

Edinburgh was crowded, full of folklore; people visiting the graves of random names J.K.Rowling chose as characters for her Harry Potter books. Bizarre comes in so many different forms, real, imagined and just because.

Taphophilia Syndrome and the Magnificent Seven

I learn a new word. Taphophile, people who are passionate about cemeteries, memorials, and the history they hold. And Taphophilia syndrome? An abnormal attraction for graves. Who knew there were so many?

The visit to London’s Highgate cemetery fascinated me because I lived so close to it for some years, yet never had an inclination to visit. Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry, set in the cemetery sat unread on my shelf for years. To read about it here and what the author encountered there was like stepping into another realm, as all these places are, existing in the in-between.

Highgate and London’s Magnificent Seven created from 1833-1841 just demonstrated to me how little the living can be aware of the cult of the dead right next door.

Day of the Dead 1-2 November

Mexico seems to be the only country that retains a feeling of celebration around the departed. Though she visits and writes of its traditions, Enriquez has never been there for the Day of the Dead, when souls return and are welcomed to their family home to eat with their living relatives.

Here in France 1 November is the public holiday Toussaint (All Saint’s Day) and there is a mass visitation to cemeteries all over the country, when families visit, tidy up, pay their respects and bring chrysanthemum’s to family graves.

The Mexican anthropologist Alfonso Alfaro said, “We are a people who maintain a privileged relationship with death.” And the art critic Luis Cardoza y Aragon wrote:

Death is a universal theme of human expression. Mexico’s feeling toward death, the familiarity, tenderness and simplicity in its treatment of death, its obsession, which it sees as neither tragic nor funereal, but rather nuptial and natal, imbued with an immediate everydayness, an imperious and serene visibility, characterized more by cascading laughter than lamentation – it all harbours the unlearned wisdom of a cosmic and playful conceptualization, as if in perpetual amazement, that is particular to Mexico.

Prague to Paris to Eva Peron and the Disappeared

Prague has its legends but is overrun by tourists; Mariana resists and admits maybe it’s because she’s not a fan of Kafka.

In Paris, I hear of the fascinating history and grisly dilemma of 12th century Holy Innocents Cemetery in the Les Halles quarter that lead to the creation of the Montmartre catacombs. And a visit down there.

Eventually the journey comes full circle to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to the aristocratic Recoleta Cemetery, where Eva Peron is buried. Described once as ‘Venice without the canals’ it has ostentatious vaults like palaces along narrow streets, where everything is above ground, a way of showing off grandeur.

Peron’s journey there is an enthralling tale of body snatching, written about in Santa Evita by Tomas Eloy Martinez. A macabre story, it is one that Enriquez shares with freinds visiting the cemetery, one she told her husband Paul on their first date, that turned into a second date, though not everyone reacts that well she admits.

The Appartition of Marta Angélica

Part of the reason to write these stories came from reflections when her friend’s mother’s remains were identified after being found in a mass grave, having disappeared thirty-five years previously, kidnapped, disappeared and presumed killed, by the military dictatorship in Argentina.

“for someone like me who grew up in a dictatorship that had the peculiarity of making bodies disappear,” the idea of a tomb and of a cemetery was overshadowed by the political trauma.

The idea of no burial, no grave, no funeral rite, that’s what’s traumatic for me.”

Thank you for patiently reading, if you made it this far.

I absolutely loved and was riveted by this book of essays. I read it over the course of a month or so, it was too interesting and thought provoking and worldwide encompassing to read too quickly. It surprised me how compelling it was, with the right blend of personal story, characters met on her travels, fascinating known and unknown history and the insights into different cultural rituals and treatment of the subject of death, burial and even the movement and perceived ownership of or control over bodies. It gives even more meaning to those letters RIP.

Highly Recommended.

Author, Mariana Enríquez

Mariana Enríquez is an award-winning Argentine novelist and journalist, whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

She is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize. Our Share of Night was awarded the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela.

“People often ask me why I like to write dark fiction. Horror. Weird tales… There is something about horror and dark fiction that is familiar and homely, and at the same time, always audacious. It’s with this language that I can explain myself and explain what I worry about.”

N.B. This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

October 23, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Iza’s Ballad by Magda Szabó (Hungary) tr. George Szirtes

A few catch up reviews from August 2025’s Women in Translation month. I realised I’ve mentioned them elsewhere but not here. The link above has a summary of all the novels I read during #WITMonth with links to reviews. So many of them were excellent 5 star reads, the 3 Italian novels, the Mexican, French.

Hungarian Literature in Translation

Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad (2014), translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes was originally published in Hungary in 1963 and brought to English fifty years later in 2014. She was the most translated Hungarian author, brought back to popularity thanks to Len Rix’s translations of her novels Abigail (2020) and The Door (2006) and Katalin street (2017).

It is the story of traditional villager Ettie and her daughter Iza, who lives in Budapest and the sequence of events in the wake of the death of Ettie’s husband Vince, when the daughter swiftly moves her mother away from the countryside and her familiar community to the city, where everything will be taken care of.

The news arrived just as she was toasting bread.

Three years earlier Iza had sent them a clever little machine that plugged into the wall and made the bread come out a pale pink; she’d turned the contraption this way and that, examined it for a while, then stowed it on the bottom shelf of the kitchen cupboard, never to use it again.

Thrust into a Modern Era

Ettie’s grief finds no solace in the new situation, baffled by the ways of her daughter and the city, where she struggles to find her place or role to assuage her loss. Even getting outside for fresh air becomes a source of anxiety due to the confusion of not knowing the area, the traffic, the transport system. Teréz who cooks, is hostile doesn’t want her in the kitchen or cleaning, no one wants her old-fashioned coffee or help.

She understood how an old woman rapidly heading towards eighty, who had spent all her life on firm ground, coping with straight forward problems, would now feel as though her life were hanging by a thread, and she also understood the bitterness she must be feeling, a bitterness she had never articulated in words that must have been there all the time: she was, after all, an old but still active woman, and she was in mourning. Having established the nature of their relationship, Teréz wanted to show her some tenderness without endangering her own importance and position.

How Not to Age Gracefully

Written in four parts, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, the narrative hops back and forth from present to past as we grow to understand the family, their relationships and the great divide between their generations and the lives they lead.

The story moves slowly through Vince’s illness and past and then speeds up with his demise as Ettie is literally thrust into a new era.

She was right, she was always right, it was just that old people grow fond of things that mean much more to them than the young.

A Formidable Daughter

Iza is an adept busy Doctor, divorced, childless, has a night companion and is extremely independent. Employing teréz to take care of all her domestic arrangements, she wants her mother to be looked after and not to have to do a thing, believing she should appreciate that.

One activity at a time she tries to find her role, only to be continuously rebuffed. Everything is taken care of and the effect as she pulls back from one potential helpful chore after the other is a slow deterioration of all ‘joie de vivre’. Her daughter’s efficiency removes all chance of Ettie helping out and efforts to do so, create more problems, further undermining the elderly mother’s sense of well-being.

She felt as if some elemental blow had destroyed everything around her and that only now did she really know what it was to be a widow, someone absolutely abandoned.

Return to One’s Roots

book cover of Magda Szabo's Iza's Ballad Hungarian literature in translation

When she hears the headstone is ready for placement, Ettie makes plans for her return. It is quite a revelation to her for everything to feel so familiar and so strange at the same time. But her time away has hastened her decline and things don’t go as smoothly as she would have liked.

There’s so much more to the story and the backstory of the character’s that leads them to the predicament they are in by the time Ettie reaches widowhood. It’s an incredibly well portrayed depiction of the sudden transition of the aging mother from her simple village home to the modern convenience of her daughter’s third floor apartment in Budapest, and the effect that removing an elderly person from their familiar environment and from the process of transitioning can have.

Thought provoking and reflective, with an element of tension as the status quo can not be supported, it’s an excellent novel that captures an important and little acknowledged societal shift, of a dying era and of interesting mother daughter power dynamics.

Have you read any good Hungarian novels?

Author, Magda Szabó

Hungarian novelist, essayist, poet and literary translator Magda Szabó was born in Debrecen, Austria–Hungary in 1917 and died in 2007. She began her literary career as a poet and disappeared from the publishing scene in the 1950’s for political reasons, making a living teaching and translating from French to English.

She began writing novels and in 1978 was awarded the Kossuth Prize, the most prestigious literary award in Hungary. Her novel The Door won the Prix Feminina Etranger in France and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and made into a film starring Helen Mirren.

She lived a long, eventful life decorated with many outstanding achievements in the field of literature, with several of her books being translated into more than 40 languages.

October 21, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017)

Around the time the Martin Scorsese film of this book came out, the author David Grann had a new nonfiction book coming out The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

The film about the Native American Osage murders was three and a half hours long and I knew that was not for me, not because the story isn’t important, but the way stories like this are portrayed cinematically in the 21st century is not for me.

I did read The Wager and thought it was excellent, and I knew if I ever came across Killers of the The Flower Moon, I would read that too.

Last week I visited our local English bookstore and there was a second hand copy sitting on the shelf, so I snapped it up and read it in a day.

Killers of the Flower Moon

So what is that title all about?

“In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage Territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets… In May, when coyotes howl beneath an unnervingly large moon, taller plants such as spiderworts and black-eyed Susans, begin to creep over the tinier blooms, stealing their light and water. The necks of the smaller flowers break and their petals flutter away, and before long they are buried underground. This is why the Osage Indians refer to May as the time of the flower-killing moon.”

Land and Oil – From Greed to Domination to Dehumanisation

Grann twists the metaphor to describe what happened to the Osage people when white settler individuals, driven by greed, racism and a total lack of empathy conspired to kill multiple members of families for their wealth and rights to oil profits.

In nature, one species nourishes the next, governed by the cycles of the Moon whereas the story he presents here, uses that phrase to describe a murderous cycle of greed and violence to annihilate and supplant the native Osage.

An Obsession with Wealth and Control

In the early 1870’s , the Osage had been driven from their lands in Kansas onto a rocky, presumably worthless reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, only to discover, decades later, that this land was sitting above some of the largest oil deposits in the United States. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and royalties.

I raced through this book, enjoying how thorough it had been researched. It is divided into three parts, Chronicle One: The Marked Woman (or The Marked Family or The Marked Tribe) focuses on four sisters Mollie, Anna , Minnie and Rita (pictured below) and their mother Lizzie, all of whom find themselves in danger of being killed in an elaborate conspiracy, without knowing who or why.

Four Sisters Targeted

The story opens with the gruesome murder of Anna and then goes back to describe the events that lead the Osage people to be where they were living, how their lives were changed, the treaty that forced them to give up their lands or be declared enemies of the United States, the banned aspects of their languages and lifestyles, the imposed education and names.

In the early 1870’s the Osage were forced to cede nearly a hundred million acres of their ancestral land (between the Arkansas River and the Missouri River), ultimately finding refuge in a 50 – by – 125 mile area in southeastern Kansas. And it was in this place that Mollie’s mother and father had come of age.

One native Osage family of four sisters targeted in the Reign of Terror in the US from 1913 - 1931 by whites seeking to obtain headrights — Osage sisters Me-se-moie (Rita), Wah-hrah-lum-pah (Anna), Wah-kon-tah–he-um-pah (Mollie) and Wa-sha-she (Minnie)

Decades later it was discovered that this infertile land sat above some of the largest oil deposits in the country. To obtain that oil, prospectors had to pay the Osage for leases and loyalties. As a result, as oil revenues grew and their wealth accumulated, the Osage became the wealthiest people per capita in the world. However, severe controls were placed on their ability to access their own money.

Who Was Behind the Murders? A Texas Lawman Investigates

While the family got no help from the local sheriff they paid various private investigators to look into the murder of Anna, when Rita and her husband were killed. The community lived in fear and needed answers.

Chronicle Two: The Evidence Man turns the focus to Texas Ranger, Tom White, who becomes the government appointed (by Edgar Hoover) lead in an investigation, when a number of others who attempt to report back to authorities are mysteriously killed, hinting at a wider conspiracy. Tom White focuses on Mollie’s family when her mother mysteriously dies and Mollie becomes the sole survivor of her family.

Under Hoover, agents were now seen as interchangeable cogs, like employees in a large corporation. This was a major departure from traditional policing, where lawmen were typically products of their own communities. The change helped insulate agents from local corruption and created a truly national force, yet it also ignored regional difference and had the dehumanising effect of constantly uprooting employees.

A Wider Conspiracy Revealed

Chronicle Three: The Reporter circles back and relooks at these events and sees that they were part of a wider pattern of targeted murders, but this is in the 21st century, where there are few people left who can recall events. However, the archives and family testimony reveal the depth of this terrible vengeance against a marginalised population, just because in the process of being banished from their original lands to other infertile lands, they happened to land on undiscovered deposits of oil and became wealthy.

Brilliantly pieced together and a horror to read, how this family of women were targeted and those around them easily influenced to participate in it and the wounding legacy of future generations who lost so much of their family over the greed and jealously of remorseless white men.

Author, David Grann

David Grann is an American journalist, a staff writer for The New Yorker, author of The Wager, The Lost City of Z, A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best true crime book. It was adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro, and Jesse Plemons.

His stories have also been published in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic, Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Wall Street Journal.

In addition to writing, Grann is a speaker who has given talks about topics from Killers of the Flower Moon and the importance of historical memory to the dangers of complicity in unjust systems, and from the art of writing and detection to the leadership methods of explorers, such as Ernest Shackleton.

October 19, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidad & Tobago)

I first heard this recommended on the Irish Times Women’s podcast summer reads of 2025 and shortly after that it was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025. It didn’t make the shortlist, but it was the novel I was most drawn to, given the adoption theme, but coming from a different culture than that we usually hear from.

Love

forms in the human body

– Louise Glück ‘The Fortress’

Forced Relinquishment Across Seas

Love FOrms by Claire Adams longlisted Booker Prize 2025 Trindad & Tobago

A 16 year old living in relative privilege in Trinidad, has one crazy night out at carnival and months later is clandestinely bundled into various transportations, made to wait at different locations, never told where she is going, crossing the water to a hideaway in neighbouring Venezuela, where she will stay a while, give birth to her baby and return alone.

It was my father who made the arrangements. My uncle helped, since he lived down south, where all this kind of business is carried out. I’m talking south-south : down past the airport, past the swamp, past the oilfields, everything. Way down at the bottom of the island, down where Columbus landed, long ago.

Years later, 58 years old, living alone in London, unable to pick up her career in medicine, two grown sons, divorced, her family still in Trinidad, she begins to search for her lost daughter, with very little knowledge, except that memory of the trip in the dark. The rest must be imagined.

I’ve spent many hours trawling through images online, trying to find this place again.But Venezuela is a big country…Even now, over forty years later, I still don’t know exactly where I was.

Gone But Never Forgotten

The novel explores a certain way of living in Trinidad, a daughter made to feel shame, an event unspoken of for more than a decade, a self-exile imposed. A child never forgotten, forever part of her, out of reach.

Over the years, I’ve come across a few photos in magazines and newspapers that I’ve cut out and kept, because they look the way I imagine her to look. I have them in different ages.

Though she maintains contact with her family, there is more than just physical distance between them. There’s a loss of intimacy, of trust, a love that overnight became conditional, an imposed silence that is easier to bear from afar.

I do love my mother dearly, despite everything, but this particular issue is fraught for us. If she and I were to start talking, and I were to finally tell her the honest truth about everything I’ve felt over these past forty years? Well, I couldn’t do something like that – not now, at her stage of life.

There’s A Community Out There

Not until she begins her search and becomes familiar with the experiences of others like her, of children like the one she abandoned, does she begin to be able to understand what it is she has been feeling, a life long loss, momentarily offered the promise of being filled, as each potential contact (a woman her daughter’s age searching for their mother) raises that hope. She confides in a work colleague, a safe stranger.

‘I wasn’t going to tell you,’ I said. ‘But I guess, why not. Another person has been in touch. A girl. I mean, a woman. From the websites. As a possible, you know. Match.

He was watching me closely, and I tried to take on the right manner. Steady and controlled, hopeful but in a measured way. With a hint of detachment, as if I were talking about something at a much greater remove, of academic interest. I said she was in Italy, a town in the north, and that she was a professional person, a biochemist with a pharmaceutical company.

This was a compelling read that would create interesting discussions, with its deeply flawed characters, many terribly inhumane behaviours and the life long wounding adults commit, who care more for status and reputation than the damage heaped on women and children for being in the too common situation of being pregnant, or birthed, unwanted. It’s a conversation and narrative that has for too long been dominated by one side, so it is good to see it being explored through fiction.

This kind of story comes in so many varieties and though this one is unique, again it is driven by the shame and blame of young women, without consideration for those whose consent is never given, those future adults severed from the natural maternal bond and their lineage, conditioned into false belonging.

On the return journey, in the jeep and then in the dented, rattling airplane, I felt as if something had changed, although I couldn’t, at that stage, have fully articulated what it was. Pieces were beginning to settle in new patterns. Maybe my story wasn’t: Dawn, who made a mistake and brought shame to her family. Maybe its: Dawn, mortal woman, who took a wrong turn in life and got lost.

One of the most hopeful parts of this novel for me, was the knowledge that this character and this author, read the forums and the stories of the many humans born into this paradigm who write of their shared, common experience of how that separation affects a child, their life, their future relationships, which helps dispel the myth, that it’s a good or right thing to do, to sever any baby from its mother.

The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood

Last year, I read the book Relinquished by Gretchen Sisson, a non fiction work that was the result of ten years of interviews, research and analysis of young women who had given up their babies, looking back at the impact of those decisions.

If you have any interest in the subject of family preservation, and creating conditions where families are supported not separated, read this. If you want to know the truth behind the experience of relinquishing a child (a lifelong trauma), not to mention the impact that has on the child (loving family or not), become more well informed by reading this excellent work.

Claire Adam, Author

Novelist Claire Adam was born and raised in Trinidad. She was educated in the United States, where she studied Physics at Brown University, and now lives in London with her husband and two children.

Her first novel, Golden Child, published in 2019, won the Desmond Elliott Prize, the McKitterick Prize, the Authors Club Best First Novel Award and was named one of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels that Changed the World’. Adam’s second novel, Love Forms, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2025.

I wanted to explore the bond between mothers and their children. On one hand, it’s the most ordinary, mundane, taken-for-granted thing in the world… on the other hand, it’s deeply mysterious. In the case of a mother and child who’ve been separated since birth, for example, often there is a pull towards each other that lasts a whole lifetime. These are people who don’t know each other, who’ve basically never ‘met’ – and yet they yearn to be together. Why is that? Claire Adam

October 17, 2025 by Claire 'Word by Word'

Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou (Cyprus) tr. by Lina Protopapa

Brandy Sour is a novella length book by the Cypriot author Constantia Soteriou, translated from Greek by Lina Protopapa. It won the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus and the author won the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story prize.

Foundry Editions, A Love of Mediterranean Literature

It was the first book published in the Foundry Editions collection of Mediterranean fiction back in 2024. This independent press was created out of a desire to discover and share new voices from the Mediterranean and the people and lands around it.

I heard about them after reading an excellent article in the Guardian entitled ‘Huge scars’: novelist finds a fractured Spain in its half-built houses about the book Far by Rosa Ribas (my review) translated by Charlotte Coombe. I sent a copy of it to a good friend in New Zealand and read it myself and loved it. I started seeing reviews for other Foundry Editions works and now I’m following their list closely.

A Turbulent History Told Through Hotel Beverages

Brandy Sour is set in the emblematic Ledra Palace Hotel, established in 1949 on Nicosia’s UN-controlled buffer zone, the Green Line that, since 1964, has divided the island into Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sectors.

It has been witness to some of the country’s significant historical events and can be considered an integral part of Cyprus’ cultural heritage and difficult past.

“The Palace was the epicentre of the island’s recent history. It was built as the promise of a new era; a haven for all nationalities, all communities. It drew people from all backgrounds: the wealthy bourgeoisie who lounged by its cerulean pool; the poorer working classes who made its beds – and its Brandy Sours…

But in 1974, it became the site of the worst battle of the war; a symbol of all that could not be allowed to fall. After the division, it was the endpoint of student demonstrations, the gathering place for those who mourned their missing.

And when the barriers finally opened, the Palace once more became a symbol of hope. Of promises that were given, but never kept. Of wounds that ran very, very deep.” Constantia Soteriou, Cyprus Mail

The book is made up of twenty two vignettes or short character studies that form an interlinked slice of life of the hotel and the many characters who have had connections to it.

From Brandy Sour to Rosebud Tea to Grape Molasses

Each character is represented by a beverage starting with the Brandy Sour : The King. Much is revealed in the opening line.

They say a barman invented the cocktail for King Farouk of Egypt in the 40’s – a dark time for the king, who is already grown and in trouble, no longer the handsome, athletic boy charming Europe with his Western manners but a heavy middle aged man facing all kinds of political headaches in Egypt – and elsewhere too – who has to conceal his fondness for alcohol.

The King asks for something that doesn’t look like a drink, with that good brandy and the lemons he likes, and the barman obliges creating a cocktail worthy of a king that wishes to deceive people, with lemonade to sweeten him and the lemons to remind him of his sorrows in a tall glass that resembles an iced tea.

We learn of the tastes of local ladies and English ladies, of the maid, the cleaner, a guerilla fighter and with every consumer of a beverage, an important anecdote relating to their predilection.

City people think that roses are only good for looking at. Village people know that flowers are also good for eating. Especially roses – those tiny pink roses, the hundred-petal roses called damask roses, the ones that climb and spread their thorns across fences and hedges.

The Doorman likes his infusion of rosebud tea in his tin mag and when he starts work at the Big Hotel he takes his tin mug and the root of a damask rose and secretly plants it in the hedge. They must be picked in August with the morning dew, or risk a bitter infusion; it helps digest the indigestible.

Coffee and How War Changes Everything

Photo by Samer Daboul Pexels.com

He always wakes at dawn and he goes to the kitchen to have his coffee prepared the way he likes it. The only coffee of the day. With lots of kaymak and no sugar. Turkish coffee – Greek coffee, he always corrects himself – with sugar is an absolute waste of coffee. It needs to be bitter. There’s no point otherwise.

After the morning ritual of the maître’d, we learn of his role as the first shots are fired and he brings the foreigners down to the basement for protection. He returns home and anxiously watches the fighting on his TV, he meets his former colleagues in a coffee shop, the maid, the cleaning lady and the doorman.

He’s taken to drinking coffee in the afternoon now, too – no sugar the way it befits funerals and grief and tragedy and death. That kind of coffee. He takes his coffee with thick kaymak and no sugar. Coffee needs to be bitter – there’s no point otherwise.

The Builder and the Grape Molasses

One of the more moving stories near the end is that of the sensitive builder who gets mouth sores when he is stressed. He can’t eat or drink, there is no medicine that can help him.

The only thing that seems to make a difference is the grape molasses an old lady whose house he fixes gives him. Grape juice molasses that you boil for hours and hours, that you boil and boil until the liquid turns thick like honey – you dab it on your lips and on your gums and it’s the only thing that can cure mouth ulcers, those little holes in your mouth.

We learn the reason for his sensitivity, for only a few have the skills he does, who know old architecture like he does, how to repair the ancient materials in the foundations, to feel and understand old houses.

Ritual, Repetition and Reassurance

In each story there is often repetition, of that which is important to the character, like the ritual of the beverage, something that is repeated, that is part of a way of life. In the same way language repeats and reassures, building connection between the ritual and the meaning and importance it brings to the community, something to be cherished. The reader too is reminded of that meaning for that character and is moved by it.

I read the book without referring to the history, but on finishing it, I wanted to know more and went looking for the wider context, as we sense the changes occurring through each character and their habits, how the hotel itself somehow embodies the collective memory of a history. Over time, it is occupied by different kinds of guests, welcome and unwelcome, civilian and military and the local people who try to accommodate them and stay safe and adjust to the new paradigm of a post-colonial, independent country and then the destabilising effect of the coup in 1974 that created a separation and dividing line between Turkish and Greek Cypriots.

It’s a beautiful, evocative tribute to a culture, a heritage and the people that have populated and passed through it, that gives pause for thought, of the essence of ritual, of the importance of even the most simple traditions and need for humans to satiate a thirst, a soulful desire.

Highly Recommended.

The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar (Iran) tr. Anonymous

In Feb 2020 I read Shokoofeh Azar’s epic debut novel, The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (my review) translated from Farsi. An Iranian writer living in exile in Australia, I was excited to have the opportunity to read a brilliant work of imagination in English. It was later shortlisted for the International Booker Prize (UK), longlisted for a National Book Award for Translated Literature (US) and three Australian Book Awards including the Stella Prize.

Iranian literature The Gowkaran tree in the middle of our kitchen by shokoofeh Azar

Translated Fiction International Booker Prize

Epic and challenging, both that novel and this latest both use elements of magic realism in a unique way to explore recent history, (that of the Iranian Revolution in 1979), while referencing mythic texts and ancient aspects of Iranian culture, which an outsider won’t necessarily pick up on them all, but how incredible a feat, to maintain a compelling plotline that explores the past and uses the metaphysical to assist with confronting situations that are painful to contemplate, creating meaning and helping to overcome trauma.

“Magical realism is not only a realm of boundless imagination, it is also a powerful literary and cultural tool for resisting dominant and imposed powers… I turn to this genre to confront authoritarian structures in Iran while celebrating the true cultural and artistic beauty of my country.”

Preserving a Culture Through Storytelling

Again in The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of Our Kitchen, Azar writes to embrace and acknowledge family, a beautifully diverse and colourful culture, complex politics, revolution and resistance.

The novel tells a story about a Zoroastrian family with twelve children and a long, interwoven lineage, where the living and the dead are both present and absent, sometimes called on or observed when needed to understand how to navigate the present. Those living in the now are often less aware than those who came before and this connection with their heritage and family is part of the way they survive difficult times.

The story starts with the strange occurrence of a Gowkaran Tree appearing one day in their bustling kitchen, travelling up towards the ceiling, alive with bird life and firmly rooted.

No one but family can see the tree, and while making repairs, their father, a University Professor decides to build a round table around the trunk. The kitchen was their centre and beneath the walls of the old mansion lay the remains of eleven other mansions.

A big, twelve-person table. In this way the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life, the Bas-Tokhmeh Tree, the Gowkaran Tree, the Tree of the Incident, became the kitchen’s centre of gravity.

The grandmother Khanom Joon tells her granddaughter (the narrator Shokoofeh) some of the old family stories, of love and storytelling and the 1,762 notebooks containing the memoirs of their ancestors. She tells her own story and that of the Ball of Light that follows her.

“Curled up in a chair, I let history go and breathed in the air of love and suddenly realised that from now on I was caught. That said, in my dreams I had seen that this madness would grip us both, neither of knowing when it began or how long it would go on. Just like this mansion and this timeless tree and the history of foreigner’s incursions and invasions in this country.”

A Heroine on a Quest, Mentors Abound

I’m not going to even attempt to describe too much of the plot, suffice to say that it is something of the heroine’s journey for the young narrator, who is in the throes of falling in love and will be sent on a quest to search for her brother Mehab, who has gone to fight in the war. A coming-of-age story in harsh times, and yet a celebration of that which continues to resist and persevere and give fruit.

The journey brings to light the terror of a country taken over by despots, and the predicaments of those who capitulate and those who refuse, the voiceless and the silenced. And throughout the Gowkaran Tree remains, rooted, alive and bringing those who remain together.

Why Trees Matter

Trees are a recurring motif in Shokoofeh Azar’s novels. Trees often live on longer than humans, just as our ancestral lineage does, they are places of refuge and transendence.

The rootedness of a big tree in the middle of a kitchen is a symbol of resistance, of strength and the power of deep, familial roots. Its central presence helps preserve what is under threat – family heritage, culture and identity.

The earthy, rooted tree grounds the magical realism element, allowing the author to meander into myth and folklore without losing the connection to the aspects of the story that are firmly rooted in reality. The reader surrenders and goes with it, relieved by the presence of the Ball of Light and terrified by the danger our protagonist is exposed to on her solo journey.

Destiny and Liberty

The book is made up of 27 chapters in two parts, Part One The Womb of Destiny takes place in and around the home mansion and in Part Two The Ordeal of Liberty, our protagonist is sent out alone on her mission to overcome challenges and learn something before her return.

“The way is reached by taking it.”

Book cover of The Gowkaran Tree in the Middle of our Kitchen by Shokoofeh Azar

If you’ve read her earlier works, you’ll be prepared for how unique the storytelling is, but if you’re not a fan of magic realism, this might challenge, however for me it was worth it for the immersion in the storytelling, culture and literary tradition, even if not all the references are familiar. The occasional footnotes are helpful.

The way the plot takes the reader on the journey to save a brother, while encountering historical characters along the way reads like a blend of fable and adventure with philosophical insights mitigating the challenging obstacles required to overcome.

At 512 pages, I admit that once I was out of holiday mode, I set it aside, due to the sheer size of it. I do think it asks a lot from readers today to engage with such a massive book.

Shokoofeh Azar has developed a unique style of magic realism to narrate harsh truths about a society under political and cultural oppression, while sharing its depths of family unity, cultural heritage and dedication to resistance. Overall, I highly recommend it and look forward to where she goes next and hope for a more taut, less ambitious novel next time.

Shokoofeh Azar, Author

Born in Iran in 1972, the author worked as a journalist and field reporter in her country, covering human rights issues. After several arrests in connection with her work as a journalist, on advice from her family, she fled Iran in 2010 and was granted asylum in Australia, where she has lived as a political refugee since.

She is the author of essays, articles, and children’s books, and is the first Iranian woman to hitchhike the entire length of the Silk Road.

N.B. Thank you to Europa Editions for the review copy.

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