I’m delighted to reveal that my historical novel, Teatime for an Empire, will be published by The Book Guild in the spring of 2027.
This feels like the perfect moment to share why this story has meant so much to me.
I was born in Cyprus many moons ago, and lived with my family in the quaint harbour town of Kyrenia, where my novel is set. Although I was only young when we moved away – first to Vienna, then Preston in Northern England – the island somehow ensnared me in its warm, beloved tentacles. One of my early compositions in seventh-grade English started with the words: Have you heard of the island Cyprus? My teacher loved the ensuing story, and wrote on the last page: ‘Wendy, one day you’ll be a writer. The world is waiting for you!’
But the story behind Teatime for an Empire goes back long before I was born.
My mother, Molly Williams (a secondary character in the novel) lived in Kyrenia during the final years of British Colonial rule in the late 1950s. My entire upbringing was filled with her fascinating stories about the glittering cocktail parties she attended, the Embassy receptions, the mountain villages she visited, hidden away along dusty hairpin roads with sweeping vistas of the azure Mediterranean way below, and the fascinating melting pot of British, Greek and Turkish cultures. Yet there was also the ubiquitous British Army presence, and the ever-present threat posed by EOKA, a terrorist organisation determined to drive the British from the island. All of these vignettes – these fragments of her long-ago life, both glamorous and at times dangerous – gradually embedded themselves in my mind and heart as I grew older, and at last remoulded themselves into fiction.
But there’s a tragic epicentre to the story. My mother’s fiancé, the British journalist Peter Fox, was killed by an EOKA gunman while visiting Cyprus in 1956. His untimely death was the reason Molly flew out to the island, intending only to visit his grave. But her ticket was one-way, and gradually she found herself falling in love with the island and its people, making friends, being offered a secretarial job, marrying, and forging an entirely new life for herself. (In fact, the man she married was no other than Peter’s Kyrenia-based friend, whose flat he’d been staying in.)
And there’s more. My novel’s two protagonists, Tansy and Miles, whose enemies-to-lovers relationship is what charges the entire story, are loosely based on two people my mother never forgot.
One was a spirited British girl who moved to Cyprus to join her parents after the father was posted to Kyrenia. My mother remembered her as a sexy young blond with an infectious, all-consuming personality; someone who often wore the flared dresses and strappy sandals of the 1950s, or cotton shorts that showed off her tanned legs. Someone always ready to dance and to speak her mind – often rather inappropriately!
This vibrant character became my novel’s main protagonist, Miss Tansy Ashcroft.
And the other person who lingered in my mother’s memory? He was a handsome British officer who she only bumped into on a handful of occasions. She always found him rather aloof and stand-offish; however, one day, while they were both waiting by the side of the road, he glanced at her, their eyes lingered – and then, totally without warning – he smiled. Although my mother was married by this time, she told me that she’d never forgotten his dark, penetrating eyes, and the grooves around his gorgeous full mouth when he smiled, and that fleeting feeling that had shuddered through her: Maybe in another life …
That handsome officer became my other protagonist, Captain Miles Fortescue.
All these stories, and countless others, filled the treasure trove of my childhood. And now, my book is at last finished and the publication journey for Teatime for an Empire has just begun.
The island that never let me go has become the novel I always knew I had to write.
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AI-generated header imaged created from one of my late father’s photographs of Cyprus.
Wendy Skorupski 