{"id":5579,"date":"2014-08-26T21:31:43","date_gmt":"2014-08-26T21:31:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.victoriahislop.com\/a-taste-for-adventure-2\/"},"modified":"2016-09-15T17:42:38","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T17:42:38","slug":"a-taste-for-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/a-taste-for-adventure\/?lang=el","title":{"rendered":"A taste for adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"profile3\"<\/a>Interview with the Cyprus Mail August 26, 2014<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Successful British novelist Victoria Hislop is about to release her new book, set in Cyprus. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman with a zest for life<\/em><\/p>\n

Victoria Hislop first came to Cyprus in 1978. That\u2019s a story in itself. She was 18 going on 19, and answered an ad in the back of a magazine: \u201cOverland journey to Cyprus, \u00a390\u201d. She was just out of school, and \u201cI wanted an adventure\u201d \u2013 so she found herself in a packed, battered nine-seater mini-van with a half-dozen other youngsters.<\/p>\n

Looking back, she says now, sitting at an outdoor caf\u00e9 in Phaneromeni Square in Nicosia, there was something very odd about the whole thing. The van belonged to a middle-aged couple, who did all the driving. They were surly and not very friendly; by the end, none of the youngsters would even speak to them. The idea was to see the sights along the way, but in fact all they saw was the inside of the mini-van. They drove and drove, relentlessly \u2013 then, in the middle of the night, the van would stop and the passengers would be ordered out to pitch their tents. Victoria recalls \u201cwaking up in Belgium in someone\u2019s garden\u201d, being harangued by an angry Belgian woman, clearly having been too tired at 3am the night before even to see where they were camping.<\/p>\n

Why did this grim-faced couple offer to drive to Cyprus? Maybe just to make some cash \u2013 but then why did they take a detour across Turkey, veering east to the plains of Anatolia where the man woke them all up one night to announce that they\u2019d been robbed, and all their money was gone? They must\u2019ve been delivering something, muses Victoria, green eyes dancing with amusement in her lively face, \u201ceither delivering or taking\u201d, with herself and the others brought in as cover. A gaggle of wide-eyed young people was much less likely to attract the attention of Customs than two miserable gits in their 50s.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, that first trip was memorable. Victoria knew about the invasion, 1974 having been \u201cthe first summer that I actually remember following current affairs; I was 14, and kind of waking up a little bit\u201d, but she\u2019d somehow forgotten that she was coming to a divided island \u2013 and was surprised when the van crossed from Mersin to the occupied north and she found herself in a non-place that wouldn\u2019t even stamp her passport. The rest of the trip (she was here for two weeks) was equally disconcerting. She had very little money, the bulk of it having been stolen \u2013 or was it? \u2013 in Turkey, and mostly ate watermelon, bread and countless tomatoes that ended up making her violently ill. The tents were boiling-hot and unbearable. The girls were courted (if that\u2019s the word) by Turkish soldiers, but Victoria felt threatened and unsafe. After all, she says, \u201cwe were English girls, and everyone makes the same assumption about English girls on holiday. And that wasn\u2019t really my thing\u201d.<\/p>\n

That traumatic teenage trip left its scars: \u201cI\u2019ve never been camping since,\u201d she admits, laughing merrily. \u201cIf someone tells me we\u2019re going to sleep in a tent, forget it!\u201d Fortunately, that dislike doesn\u2019t extend to Cyprus itself \u2013 and in fact Cyprus is the subject of her new book The Sunrise<\/em>, her fourth novel since making her name with The Island<\/em> in 2005. That debut, a big hit in Britain and even bigger hit in Greece (where it became a hugely successful TV series), was set on the leprosy colony of Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete; since then she\u2019s written The Return<\/em>, set during the Spanish Civil War, and The Thread<\/em>, set in Thessaloniki \u2013 and nowThe Sunrise, which takes place in Famagusta before and during the invasion.<\/p>\n

Writing about other countries\u2019 histories has its pitfalls, but so far no-one\u2019s complained about ignorant foreigners sticking their nose into things they don\u2019t understand. That could change here, notes Victoria with a rueful grin. I feel like I\u2019m licking my fingers and putting them in a wall socket, she says, pointing vaguely at the wall of the caf\u00e9: \u201cI\u2019m going to have some electric shocks, for sure\u201d. (read more at the Cyprus Mail<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview with the Cyprus Mail August 26, 2014 Successful British novelist Victoria Hislop is about to release her new book, set in Cyprus. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21884,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[295,462,447,296],"tags":[297,316,298,299],"class_list":["post-5579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyprus-el-2","category-interview-2-el","category-news-el","category-the-sunrise-el-2","tag-cyprus-el","tag-en-el","tag-famagusta-el","tag-the-sunrise-el","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5579"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5579\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.victoriahislop.co.uk\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}