Women in Translation Book Club: Brandy Sour (online)

Please note this meeting will be *online only*. There will be a mixture of in-person and online meetings throughout the year.

The Women In Translation reading group provides a free, friendly and gentle environment in which opinions are shared and new appreciations can be discovered. A place for curious minds and relaxed conversation hosted by poet and translator Annie Rutherford.

For April 2025 the book will meet online to discuss Brandy Sour by Constantia Soteriou, translated by Lina Protopapa.

Please support the bookshop & the book club by ordering your books through Lighthouse, Use the code LONG-VICTORIOUS-WIT for bookclubbers 10% off.

The book:

The Winner of the 2023 Cypriot National Book Prize

When it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou’s jewel of a novella, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island’s turbulent twentieth century are played out by its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, among the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her.

They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.