Maureen Freely – författare

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.

My Blue Peninsula is a confession that fills seven notebooks, with a final notebook left mostly empty. In them, Dora Giraud tries to explain to her adult daughters why she remains in Istanbul after escaping death at the hands of extremists, and why she risks her life to campaign for the truth about the Greek, Armenian, and Assyrian genocides, ferociously denied for a century by the Turkish state.  

Dora''s desperate need to understand her family history is the thread that binds this story''s conflicting fragments. As the direct descendant of the genocides'' victims and perpetrators, she carries a tangled legacy of loss and betrayal, lies and ill-gotten gains. With this confession, she hopes to set her daughters free. But can she?

My Blue Peninsula is Maureen Freely''s fourth novel set in Istanbul, the city of her childhood. In each, a character from the sidelines of the preceding novel takes centre stage to probe a mystery left pending. We first met Dora Giraud in Sailing Through Byzantium as the observant daughter of a famously bohemian household who could not, then, speak the truth.