Mother Land

Dmetri Kakmi

From Shelf: My Eland Collection

Mother Land is a brilliant debut autobiographical novel with a literary style that recalls such coming-of-age novels as Catcher in the Rye and The Kite Flyer.

Set in the late 1960s, Mother Land describes life on an Aegean island, seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy. It is the first-hand account of a Greek boy, born on a Turkish island, trying to make sense of the escalating tension between Greek and Turk, Muslim and Christian, mother and father, and reveals with chilling clarity how violence begets violence, in even the most unexpected of people and how, despite anger and exile, reconciliation is possible. Mother Land is a compulsive page-turner and this original, humane and uplifting account keeps the reader's interest to the very last page, as the adult Dmetri returns to his island home to extract one last story, to unearth one more secret, in the hope of making peace with the past.