The Library of Nicosia

A mesmerizing historical novel about two people whose love is shaped and then shattered by war, set against the turmoil of Cyprus and the secret sanctuary hidden at its dividing line, from the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo.

July 15, 1974. On the day of the coup, Nicos—a young Greek Cypriot—crosses Nicosia to find his Yasmine, the Turkish Cypriot daughter of a bookseller. Ali’s bookshop has always been a counterworld to the strife unfolding around them, where Nicos and Yasmine learned to imagine Cyprus not as a single purified identity but as something plural and in-between. Upon finding the bookshop ablaze and empty, and scrambling to salvage books from the ashes, Nicos hears whispers of a hidden underground chapel beneath the city where they can be stored. Soon, what began as a desperate attempt to save Yasmine’s world takes on a new, clandestine life.

Meanwhile, Yasmine and Ali are forced to flee Nicosia and toward exile, taking them further from the place and stories that shaped her. Yet even as a new life, bright with possibility, opens before her, she holds fast to the memories and promises of home.

Moving between the violence of 1974 and the uneasy peace of the buffer zone in 2002, The Library of Nicosia casts an eye on a Cyprus turbulently transformed. As the reality of No Man’s Land begins to swallow ordinary life whole, two lovers hope to meet again on a divided island that may still, however briefly, remember how to live between languages and stories.