Songbirds(86)

Thank you to my foreign rights agent at MGOC, Vicki Satlow, for being so amazing, and for everything you have done for me over the years.

Thank you so so much to my publishers at Manilla Press. Thank you Kate Parkin for your constant and unwavering support and for everything you have done, for being so caring, insightful and passionate. Margaret Stead – you have been absolutely amazing – all those conversations we had over the phone during lockdown, your insight, your suggestions, your imagination and creativity, and absolutely everything you have done to help make this novel happen.

Thank you to Perminder Mann for all of your support. Thank you Clare Kelly, Felice McKeown and Katie Lumsden – you are all so great to work with; thank you for all the hard work you have put into bringing this novel out.

Thank you to all my friends and family for your love and support over the years. Thank you to my brother, Kyri, and his wife for always encouraging me and being there for me. Thank you to Maria and Antony for being the best friends anyone can ask for. Thank you to Stellios Arseniyadis for listening to all my ideas during the editing process, and for being so helpful and supportive. Thank you to Claire and Sam Afhim for your friendship and support. Thank you to Louis Evangelou for your advice, for being so helpful, caring and endlessly patient. Thank you to the whole Evangelou family – Katerina, Tina and Chris – for all your support and help and lovely food and love, always.

Thank you especially to my dad and Yiota for always being there for me, encouraging me never to give up and for all your love and help. Thank you to my mum, though you are no longer with us – thank you for the love you gave me, the belief you had in me and for how funny and creative you were. I have those things with me, every step I take.

Every time I write a novel, I learn so much, and I’d really like to thank everybody who helped me to know, to understand, and to see things in a new way.





Dear Reader,



Around ten years ago, I became friends with a domestic worker in Cyprus who worked for a close family member. Menaka was from Sri Lanka and had not seen her two daughters for eight years. She used to speak to them on her tablet; she was a mother to them through a screen. She introduced me to her daughters, she showed me her house and the streets of her hometown through the iPad. On screen, she showed me the trees, the flowers, the sky, the food – she wanted me to know what home meant to her, what it smelled like and tasted like and how it felt. We went on virtual walks together through the town with her daughters and mother-in-law. Sometimes, like any parent, she would need to tell her daughters off, or remind them to do their homework; often she told them she loved them – always through a screen. She told me the story of how she was widowed when her husband, the love of her life, died in a farming accident. Subsequently, she had to make the difficult decision to work abroad as a domestic worker, in order to provide for her children. Since then, she has not been able to be present for her daughters as they grow up. She sends them clothes and money, but she cannot be there with them, as they grow into young adults. I could see the strength, resilience and immense love that Menaka had within her, but I also came to see the immense suffering of her sacrifice. In the meantime, I could see how the other women, in all the households along that street, went about their duties, often unseen and misunderstood. ‘Ah,’ one of the neighbours said to me once, ‘these women don’t care about their families, they drift around the world.’

While I was on tour for The Beekeeper of Aleppo, I was often asked: ‘How can we get people to understand that refugees are not like migrants, that they have come because they do not have a choice?’ This question saddened me. Migrants are often forced to leave their homes for less obvious reasons than war – but they still leave because they feel that they have no choice.

Songbirds was influenced both by this question and by a recent tragedy in Cyprus, in which five migrant women domestic workers and two of their children disappeared. When the women were reported missing, the authorities did not investigate their disappearance or search for them, because they were foreign – it was assumed that they had simply moved on. Later, however, it was discovered that the women and children had been murdered. In reality, almost two years had passed before a couple of tourists discovered the first victim in an abandoned mine shaft after a heavy rainfall. This was a woman who had been reported missing and whose disappearance had been completely dismissed.

I followed the events as they unfolded. With a broken heart, I read newspapers and watched the Cypriot news, spoke to friends. But I was not surprised at all that nobody had searched for these women and their children. I was not surprised that an investigation had not been launched, that the police had dismissed them as runaways. I felt anger, such anger, because over the years I had witnessed the reality of what had led to such gross negligence.

Most of my family live in Cyprus. I was born in the UK because my parents came as refugees after the war in 1974. Most of the middle-class families in Cyprus – just as they do all over the world – hire domestic workers. In Cyprus, you do not have to be rich to have a domestic worker, just reasonably comfortable. So, the presence of these women, who run the households, look after children, walk the dogs, clean the restaurants/shops or whatever other businesses or properties their employers might own, is commonplace. Migrant domestic workers are a part of the fabric of Cypriot life.

This story is not an attempt to represent the voices of migrant workers or to speak for them, it is an exploration of the ideologies, prejudices, circumstances and underlying belief systems that can lead to very sad and often catastrophic events. It is an exploration of the way in which a flawed system can trap people. It is also a story about all forms of entrapment – the way we can all trap ourselves into certain ways of seeing and being.