Sailing Through Byzantium by Maureen Freely
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Blurb: It’s one minute to midnight on 27th October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis is entering its final countdown as the world prepares for nuclear winter. But in Istanbul’s old bohemian quarter, a confederacy of free spirits has gathered around a baby grand to see the night out in style. The moment is captured in a legendary photograph. Behind them, dark ships pass along the Bosphorus. Some could be Soviet tankers, smuggling missiles to Cuba, but tonight no one is looking. All eyes are on Grace, the dark-haired singer. All that matters is her sublime voice, and her song: Stormy Weather. The girl crouched beneath the piano is the discordant note in the flamboyant scene. This is Mimi, Grace’s nine-year old daughter. Until tonight she believed every word her mother uttered. Now she sees a byzantine web of lies. Who abandoned whom that night? And why did it change her life forever? (The Linen Press, 2013)
Alev Adil, The Independent
“Maureen Freely, famous as Orhan Pamuk’s most adept translator into English, is also an accomplished novelist. Those new to her chronicles of life among the Istanbul American community of the 1960s and 1970s – this is her third novel in that milieu – will be beguiled by her cast of alluring Fellini-esque characters. Devoted readers of The Life of the Party and Enlightenment are reunited with sorely missed old friends, like the skinny-dipping dipsomaniac academic Hector Cabot, William Wakefield, the cynical spy master, and Ismet the seductive secret policeman with black velvet eyes.”
Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
“Hyper-imaginative Mimi observes all this with a mix of ingenuity and ingenuousness reminiscent of the heroine of What Maisie Knew, Henry James’s novel that gives an oblique child’s-eye-view of adult irresponsibility and duplicity. As in that book, there is pathos as well as comedy. Communicated with artless candour, Mimi’s misunderstandings generate entertaining scenes of family consternation and social embarrassment. But, in her quest to unearth communist agents, she unknowingly lays bare betrayals of other kinds that have painful repercussions.”
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