August, 2004. High-school sweethearts Aristos and Agathi, and Petros and Melina, are the best of friends, until Aristos declares that he is leaving Cyprus for university.
Seven years later, Aristos returns with his new girlfriend, Wendy, to find Petros and Melina engaged, and Agathi still hung up on him.
As the estranged friends become reacquainted, their worlds come apart. All of them have wrongs to right, but with Cyprus hurtling towards the worst aviation disaster in its history, they might have less time than they think.
Award-winning Cyprus based author Eva Asprakis’ newest book Ghost Flight is a tale of friendship, secrets, and post-conflict Cyprus.
Ghost Flight is set in the shadow of the 2005 Helios Airways Flight 522 incident and explores the impact of intersecting histories and focuses on themes of time, memory, and reconciliation.
At the time of the incident Eva was five-years-old, and it’s something that she has never forgotten.
“My parents and I had been in Cyprus visiting family and were due to fly back to London the following day, with Helios Airways. The fear expressed by friends and relatives before we boarded that flight stuck with me, and so I think it was inevitable that it would influence my work,” she told Neos Kosmos.
The story is also set during a time of change in Cyprus. Between 2003 and 2005, the country opened its first crossing point between north and south, joined the European Union, and voted on the Annan Plan for reunification.
But being Cypriot by adoption rather than by birth, having grown up in London, Eva said she writes of Cyprus in two manners.
“I write with an awareness that I am both insider and outsider here,” she said.
“I write of Cyprus as tenderly as only someone who has chosen their home country can and, at the same time, as impartially as only a foreigner could.
“Ghost Flight is not a book with an agenda. It doesn’t look at the political sides of 1974, the ongoing search for missing persons or even the Helios Airways Flight 522 tragedy, but at the human ones.
“It shows through varying perspectives how our individual pasts can shape our present outlooks, and that none of us are right or wrong so much as differently predisposed to the views we hold.”
Eva said she hopes that readers may take this kind of empathy into their future conversations about Cyprus.
Rather than unpacking the grief that will follow the Helios Airways Flight 522 tragedy, the story looks at the urgency that preludes it.
For the characters, it’s to live and to love.
Nonetheless, since the publication of Ghost Flight, Eva has had several people who lost loved ones in the tragedy approach her.
“Initially, this felt daunting, but the overwhelming response has been one of gratitude that the story is being told,” she said.
“As stated by Michalis Hadjipantelas at the tragedy’s 2024 memorial service, ‘Commemoration is resistance to defeat the ugliness of death’.”
Ghost Flight is available on Amazon and other online booksellers.
