Bone Ash Sky (81 page)
Shukran
to Omran Matar, who read with an eye to correcting my Arabic and any strange ideas I had about Lebanese culture, religion(s) and customs.
Also to Michael Lever, who did the same for the Israeli/Jewish sections.
I would also like to thank Dr Charles Herdy, who helped me immensely with matters military.
All mistakes and misconceptions are mine.
A special, heartfelt thank you to Jane Turner, who graciously allowed me to leave our business partnership at Gertrude and Alice Café Bookstore to pursue my writing ambitions.
To my dear friend Larissa Reid: it was in your home that I finished one of the many drafts of this book. Thank you for your gentleness and generosity of spirit.
The people of Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, the Gulf and Armenia speeded the progress of this book with their recollections, hopes, honesty and hospitality. I thank every one of them for sharing their stories and lives with me in 1995, 1998, 2002, 2004 and 2010.
Aghapi
to my mother Anastasia Bakas and my father Graham Cosgrove, whose unobtrusive support smoothed the writer’s path.
To my sister Annette Livas, who died in October 2010, my deepest thanks for the many times I needed to hear your voice over the phone: for your strength, serenity and sheer will. Thank you for the beautiful example that was your life.
Finally, I am blessed with my daughter Damascin, who, with her devastating mixture of innocence and intensity, has taught me a new – and more time-efficient! – way to write.
For further reading, sources and articles go to
www.katerinacosgrove.com
Praise for
The Glass Heart
‘
The Glass Heart
shimmers with Cosgrove’s evocative powers … Visceral images of eating, drinking, love-making, giving birth and dying are treated with an unerring eye. Cosgrove’s writing has beautiful, poetic flourishes so it’s not surprising her name has been coupled with the likes of Allende and Garcia Marquez.’
The Age
‘Cancel that trip to the Greek islands and read this book instead … this is as real as it gets. It would be difficult to surpass Katerina Cosgrove’s intense evocation … This book will erase your sense of the here and now … Cosgrove does not flinch from offsetting the good with the bad, powerfully rendering the difficulty and rawness … intimately, jaggedly female in its bias, scored with eroticism, pain and loss … this is a captivating read.’
The Australian
‘When you read a book that’s fantastic it takes – perhaps unfairly – from those around it. And so
The Glass Heart
draws an invisible line around itself that says, this book is special, take it slowly, enjoy it, remember it … The measured prose links past and present with parallels in plot, subtle shifts in imagery and the constant counterbalance of two different lives …’
The Canberra Times
‘This is a provocative, sensual telling of relationships and bonds that defy generations … Cosgrove’s telling is tantalisingly ripe with the tastes and smells of Greece … Her characters are drawn with honesty and rawness as she digs a finger into the dark and brittle places of the heart.’
The Sunday Mail
‘Cosgrove is … a young writer who truly does fulfil that most hackneyed phrase “an exciting new talent”.’
The Gold Coast Bulletin
Praise for
Intimate Distance
‘a tale of infidelity and parenthood … Cosgrove’s loving depiction of the Greek setting and her sophisticated craftsmanship help ground the controversial, motherhood–parenthood theme.’
The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Cosgrove’s unchronological narrative is vastly effective in charting the protagonist’s confused state of jumbled emotions, displacement and disarray. With its overarching themes of forbidden love, abandonment, filial duty versus individual needs, and unresolved passion,
Intimate Distance
effectively delves into the dichotomy between the individualistic societies of the West and the more family-oriented, collective societies of Greece.’
ArtsHub
‘
Intimate Distance
by Katerina Cosgrove is … a page turner … packed with dynamite charges. [Moving] back and forth through three time zones and three countries … [a] complex web of family loyalties and conflicts emerge. This is a story that lingers in the mind long after it is read.’
M/C Reviews
Katerina has been a Sydney bookseller (Sappho Books and Gertrude & Alice cafe bookstore), university tutor and has completed a doctorate in Creative Arts. Her first novel,
The Glass Heart
(2000), was published by HarperCollins in Australia and Govostis in Greece to critical acclaim and in 2012 Katerina was one of the winners of the Griffith Review/CAL Novella Prize, for
Intimate Distance
. She began
Bone Ash Sky
with the aid of an Australia Council grant and a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland and travelled to Armenia, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria for research. In 2010 she published a controversial article in
The Australian
, ‘Turkey must lift veil on first Holocaust’. An earlier of
Bone Ash Sky
version was shortlisted for the Writing Australia unpublished manuscript prize. For more about Katerina, go to
www.katerinacosgrove.com
or like her on
www.facebook.com/AuthorCosgrove
.
This ebook published in 2013 by Hardie Grant Books
Published in print in 2013 by Hardie Grant Books
Hardie Grant Books (Australia)
Ground Floor, Building 1
658 Church Street
Richmond, Victoria 3121
www.hardiegrant.com.au
Hardie Grant Books (UK)
Dudley House, North Suite
34–35 Southampton Street
London WC2E 7HF
www.hardiegrant.co.uk
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
Copyright © Katerina Cosgrove, 2013
Copyright maps © Katerina Cosgrove, 2013
Cataloguing-in-publication data available from
the National Library of Australia.
Bone Ash Sky
eISBN: 978 1 74273 9 915
Cover and text design by Nada Backovic
Cover images courtesy Corbis (Damascus 1925, Aleppo 2012)
Author photograph by Sophie Haythornthwaite
Digital editing by Hannah Koelmeyer