18 Books About Cyprus: Fiction and Non-Fiction Picks

In researching this list of the best books about Cyprus, I kept coming back to one word: divided.

Cyprus is a small island with an outsized history; colonised by the British, contested by Greece and Turkey, and split down the middle since 1974, with its capital, Nicosia, still the last divided city in Europe. A green-and-white buffer zone, patrolled by the UN, cuts straight through Ledra Street (remember that name for later in this list).

That fracture runs through almost everything written about the island, whether the writer is Cypriot, part of the diaspora, or simply passing through.

This list gathers fiction set in Cyprus, much of it wrestling directly with 1974 and its long aftermath, alongside non-fiction books about Cyprus that trace the island’s story from British rule to the present-day stalemate.

Missing villages, exiled kings, ghost towns, refugees who never stopped waiting to go home: that’s Cyprus, or at least, the version of it that keeps drawing writers back.

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Fiction Books Set in Cyprus

1. The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

Shafak’s novel moves between 1970s Nicosia and present-day London, following two teenagers (a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot) whose love affair is interrupted by the island’s civil war and the 1974 division.

Decades later, their daughter in London begins asking questions her parents have spent a lifetime avoiding.

The novel is narrated in part by a fig tree smuggled out of Cyprus in a suitcase, giving the book an unusual, tender way of holding grief and memory across generations and continents.

About the author: Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist and one of the most widely translated writers working in Turkish and English, known for weaving political history into intimate, often magical-realist storytelling.

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2. The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop

Set in Famagusta in the summer of 1974, the novel follows the owners, staff, and guests of a glamorous beachfront hotel as the Turkish invasion arrives without warning, transforming the city’s most fashionable resort into the ghost town it remains to this day.

Hislop is particularly good at showing ordinary people—Greek Cypriot, Turkish Cypriot, and foreign—forced into impossible choices as the city empties around them.

About the author: Victoria Hislop is a British novelist best known for historical fiction set in Greece and Cyprus, and was made an honorary citizen of Crete for her work bringing Greek history to English-language readers.

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3. A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible by Christy Lefteri

Set during the 1974 conflict, Christy Lefteri’s debut novel follows an elderly Turkish Cypriot man and a young Greek Cypriot woman who find themselves reluctantly sharing a house as their village empties of everyone else, forced by circumstance into an uneasy, ultimately humane companionship.

Lefteri, who grew up hearing her parents’ stories of the conflict, writes the strangeness of displacement with a light, almost folkloric touch.

About the author: Christy Lefteri is a British-Cypriot novelist and creative writing lecturer whose work often centres on refugees and the long tail of war.

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4. Songbirds by Christy Lefteri

Set in contemporary Nicosia, the novel follows Nisha, a Sri Lankan domestic worker who goes missing, and the two people whose lives she touched: her employer, and the poacher she was secretly in love with.

Together, they search for her, uncovering the precarious, often invisible world of migrant domestic workers on the island.

It’s a quieter, more contemporary companion to Lefteri’s earlier war fiction, turning to Cyprus’s present-day fault lines around migration and labour.

About the author: Christy Lefteri worked as a volunteer at a refugee centre in Athens, an experience that shaped much of her recent fiction, including her bestselling novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo.

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5. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Though most of the novel unfolds in a London psychiatric unit, Michaelides threads a Cypriot childhood through his psychotherapist narrator’s backstory, and the island’s landscape and folklore surface at pivotal moments in this bestselling psychological thriller.

Alicia Berenson, a painter who has not spoken a word since allegedly murdering her husband, becomes the obsession of a therapist determined to make her talk.

About the author: Alex Michaelides is a Cypriot-British author and screenwriter whose debut novel became a global bestseller and was translated into more than fifty languages.

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6. Death in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye

First published in 1956 and reissued decades later as part of Kaye’s “Death In…” series, this classic mystery follows a young Englishwoman travelling to Cyprus who finds herself drawn into a murder investigation aboard ship and on the island itself.

It’s a vintage, atmospheric whodunnit; golden-age crime fiction with Cyprus’s mountains and coastline as the backdrop, written while Kaye herself was living on the island as a colonial wife.

About the author: M.M. Kaye was a British novelist best known for The Far Pavilions, who drew on decades spent living across the British colonies, including Cyprus, for her fiction.

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7. Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou

Translated by Lina Protopapa

Winner of the 2023 Cyprus National Book Prize, this novella unfolds as a series of vignettes set inside Nicosia’s Ledra Palace Hotel, once the height of 1950s glamour and later the site of the war’s worst fighting and, after partition, a UN buffer-zone outpost.

Through the eyes of guests, staff, and passers-by (a king in exile, a porter, a UN officer, a cleaning lady with her holy water), Soteriou tells the story of modern Cyprus through the building that watched it happen.

About the author: Constantia Soteriou is a Cypriot novelist born in Nicosia in 1975, whose earlier novels have been shortlisted for the Greek and Cypriot National Book Awards, and who won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2019.

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8. Swimming to Ithaca by Simon Mawer

Mawer’s novel follows a family split by the 1974 conflict: a father in the British armed forces stationed on the island, and the daughter who returns decades later trying to piece together what actually happened to her family during those chaotic weeks.

Moving between the 1970s and the present, it’s as much about the unreliability of memory and family myth-making as it is about the events of the war itself.

About the author: Simon Mawer is a British novelist whose father was posted to Cyprus, giving him a personal connection to the material behind this novel.

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9. Ledra Street by Nora Nadjarian

This debut short-story collection takes its name from the Nicosia street cut in two by the island’s partition, and uses it as the anchor for a set of stories moving between the absurd, the political, and the achingly personal.

Nadjarian’s title story imagines a fictional fatal accident on Ledra Street whose senselessness mirrors the real senselessness of a city split by a line on a map, while other stories follow migrant workers, failing relationships, and the everyday strangeness of life in “the world’s last divided capital.”

About the author: Nora Nadjarian is an award-winning Cypriot poet and short-story writer based in Nicosia, whose work has been recognised in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition among others.

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10. Maistrotramountana: A Kyrenia Sea Story by Andreas Keleshis

Set in the seaside town of Kyrenia in the 1950s, years before the north of the island became inaccessible to most Greek Cypriots, this short novel follows a father and son caught at sea in the fury of the maistrotramountana, a violent wind Mediterranean sailors have long feared.

It’s a rare piece of Cypriot fiction set in Kyrenia before partition, offering a glimpse of the town’s daily rhythms and its relationship with the sea that once defined it.

About the author: Andreas Keleshis’s novel draws on a lifetime of maritime knowledge passed down through Kyrenia’s fishing families, of the kind the book’s young protagonist must rely on to survive.

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11. Gregory and Other Stories by Panos Ioannides

This collection of twelve short stories and novellas moves across Cyprus’s turbulent twentieth century, from ancient myth-inflected parables to the island’s anti-colonial struggle.

Its title story, adapted for the stage and translated into dozens of languages, follows a group of EOKA guerrilla fighters whose growing friendship with their British hostage does not stop them carrying out the order to execute him.

About the author: Panos Ioannides was born in Famagusta in 1935 and is widely considered Cyprus’s best-known prose writer, having served as President of the Cyprus PEN Centre.

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12. The Way it Breaks by Polis Loizou

Set around Limassol, this contemporary novel follows Orestis, a young Cypriot man chasing a better life, whose path to a job at his old school friend’s father’s hotel leads him instead into the orbit of a high-end gigolo and a wealthy Belarusian client.

Loizou is particularly praised for writing Cyprus beyond its postcard image of blue seas and beaches, giving readers a contemporary island of ambition, class, and reinvention.

About the author: Polis Loizou is a Cypriot-born, UK-based playwright and novelist whose debut, Disbanded Kingdom, was longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize.

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Non-Fiction Books About Cyprus

1. Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean by Alex Christofi

Named after a lost Cypriot epic that once served as a prequel to The Odyssey, this Waterstones Book of the Year (2024) traces Cyprus’s history from ancient myth to the present day, moving between salt lakes, crusader castles, and the eerie deserted town of Varosha.

Christofi, who is of Cypriot descent, blends personal reflection with sweeping history, considering the island as a place where Christian and Arab cultures, and Byzantine, Ottoman and British empires, have all left their mark.

About the author: Alex Christofi is a British Cypriot writer and publishing director whose earlier work, Dostoevsky in Love, was named a book of the year by the Times and Sunday Times.

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2. Journey into Cyprus by Colin Thubron

Written after Thubron walked the length of the island in the early 1970s (shortly before the war that would divide it), this travel classic captures a Cyprus that, in many ways, no longer exists: one where Greek and Turkish Cypriot villages sat within walking distance of each other.

Thubron’s prose is precise and unsentimental, and the book has taken on added weight as an accidental record of the island in its final years before partition.

About the author: Colin Thubron is one of Britain’s most celebrated travel writers, known for combining rigorous historical research with a novelist’s eye for landscape and character.

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3. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell moved to Cyprus in 1953, buying and restoring a house in the mountain village of Bellapais, and this memoir captures both his life among his Cypriot neighbours and the island’s descent into the anti-colonial EOKA struggle that would eventually force him to leave.

It remains one of the most widely read books ever written about Cyprus, prized for its lyrical descriptions of village life even as it documents the unravelling of British rule from the inside.

About the author: Lawrence Durrell was a British novelist and travel writer whose Mediterranean “island books” on Corfu, Rhodes, and Cyprus remain classics of the genre.

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4. Refugee in My Homeland by Rina Catselli

Written by a woman who fled her native Kyrenia after the 1974 Turkish invasion, this chronicle documents the disorientation and grief of sudden displacement, from someone who went on to become the first Greek Cypriot woman elected to the Cyprus House of Representatives.

The book sits at the intersection of memoir and testimony, giving a first-hand account of exactly the kind of displacement other writers on this list, from Shafak to Hislop, have approached through fiction. However, I haven’t been able to find a copy available to buy online yet.

About the author: Rina Catselli was a Cypriot writer and politician who served in the Cyprus Parliament from 1981, and whose work frequently returned to her displacement from Kyrenia.

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5. Sweet and Bitter Island by Tabitha Morgan

Beginning with the 1878 landing of British troops at Larnaca and ending with Cypriot independence in 1960, this history traces the uneasy, often mismanaged relationship between Britain and Cyprus, drawing on largely unpublished archival material.

Morgan is especially good on the social segregation and administrative missteps that fed Cypriot disillusionment with British rule, offering context for the tensions that would later explode into civil conflict.

About the author: Tabitha Morgan read English at Cambridge and reported on Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean for the BBC for over a decade.

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6. Echoes from the Dead Zone: Across the Cyprus Divide by Yiannis Papadakis

Papadakis, a Greek Cypriot anthropologist, travelled to Turkey to learn Turkish and then crossed into the Turkish Cypriot side of the island (an unusual move for the time) to understand how each community’s history of the conflict mirrors the other’s.

The result is a rare piece of scholarship that treats both sides of Cyprus’s “Dead Zone” with equal curiosity, exploring how nationalism, blame, and memory work almost identically on either side of the line.

About the author: Yiannis Papadakis is Associate Professor of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus, and a leading scholar on Cypriot identity and division.

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More Books About Cyprus

Looking at this list as a whole, what strikes me is how rarely Cypriot writers, or writers drawn to Cyprus, can avoid the line running through Nicosia. Even the lightest of these books—a golden-age mystery, a psychological thriller—eventually finds its way back to the island’s central fracture, often with often the stubborn hope that it might not be permanent.

Don’t see your favourite book about Cyprus on this list? Let me know in the comments.

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Fantastic Books & Where to Find Them

For more of what to read where, check out my full Travel Books Guide, filled with book recommendations for different destinations, the most beautiful bookstores around the world, tips on how to get the best deals on audiobooks and e-books, as well as more literary travel.