Sailing Through Byzantium

Sunday Times Books of the Year 2103 'The 1962 Cuban missile crisis provides a threatening hinterland to this novel focused on Istanbul's raffishly bohemian American expat colony. Comic mishaps and painful predicaments are silhouetted against the old imperial capital's melancholy, mouldering grandeur.' - Peter Kemp, Sunday Times Books of the Year 2013 'Freely's roman à clef is compulsively readable, thought-provoking and entertaining.' - The Independent 'Sailing Through Byzantium glints with ironic wit . . . Haunting vignettes heighten the melancholy that coexists with sardonic flair and narrative bustle in this engaging novel.' - Sunday Times 'In Sailing through Byzantium, Maureen Freely's Istanbul is an absorbing Never-Never Land, a place of wild parties and refuge for social pariahs. This book is full of surprises . . . the cover with its moody close-up of a solemn child gives no clue about its level of intrigue, or its cleareyed prose.' - Times Literary Supplement ' Finely calibrated, compassionate and compellingly observed, Sailing Through Byzantium is a triumph.' - Jason Goodwin, Cornucopia 'History pours through this wonderful novel, but refracted through a young girl's enchantment and dread. This is the story of a country, a city, a family, a scared child, in which memory throws the past into a kaleidoscopic pattern, vivid and always changing. In other words: quite fabulous!' - Nicci Gerrard 'Rich, seductive, exciting.' - Maggie Gee 'What Freely does succinctly and memorably is conjure up the picture of Turkey in the 1960s - how odd, how romantic and how mysterious it must have seemed to a young child from distant America. And what a gift to the reader.' - Alison Coles, BookOxygen

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?

On the 27th October 2012, Mimi has come back, haunted by these unanswered questions, to make her peace with the past.