BOOK

A poignant tale of a hotel and its guests – and also the story of modern Cyprus and its civil war

BRANDY SOUR is a moving, original, and playful novel set in the first luxury hotel in the

Middle East, the Ledra Palace Hotel in Nicosia. Situated in the middle of what became the Green Line dividing North and South, it went from an iconic symbol of Cypriot modernisation to the site of conflicts during the Civil War and finally the UN headquarters building in the war’s aftermath. It’s bedrooms, glamorous public spaces and lush gardens are the setting for this tale of modern Cypriot history through different characters staying through time, and their favourite drinks. We meet the Egyptian king Farouk in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea, the Turkish porter who can’t do without the ayran that he found on the wrong side of the Green Line, the UN ambassador who drinks lemonade in a crisis and the cleaning lady who only needs her holy water. These characters are the sometimes brave, sometimes terrified, often reluctant actors in history and witnesses of the violence that characterised the second half of the twentieth century in Cyprus. BRANDY SOUR won the 2023 National Book Prize in Cyprus and Constantia Soteriou won the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

AUTHOR

Constantia Soteriou was born in Nicosia in 1975. Her novels Aishe Goes on Vacation and Voices

Made of Soil were shortlisted for the Greek and Cypriot National Book Awards. Her short story,

‘Death Customs’, translated into English by Lina Protopapa, was the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. ‘Bitter Country’, her most recent book (Patakis, 2020) revolves around the final moments of the mother of an eighteen-year-old man who went missing in the 1974 coup d’état. Her short stories have been translated into English, Italian, Danish, Turkish, Serbian, and Ukrainian, among other languages. Her short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 to celebrate the

10th anniversary of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

TRANSLATOR

Lina Protopapa is a translator and literary critic based in Nicosia, Cyprus. Her translation of Constantia Soteriou’s “Death Customs” from the Greek received the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize while her translation of Nikolas Kyriakou’s “The Debt” was shortlisted for the same prize in 2020. Her work has appeared in Granta, adda, Fractal, Hartis Magazine, and on BBC Radio 4