Demosthenes likes jumping from the rooftop stairs of his family’s stately home in Old Nicosia believing he can fly to the Middle East to visit his father. Excelling at school, he’s curious to find out why his island has been passed around by colonisers for 11,000 years. In 1974, war and abuse shatter Demosthenes’s childhood innocence and the family flees Cyprus for Australia. Within seven years, Cyprus becomes a distant memory for Demosthenes, one filled with the vivid recall of the intoxicating scent of Greek jasmine and wild freesias. This heart-wrenching debut novel, inspired by true-life events, is written as an acutely observed memoir, with both a first and a third person narrative. Set in the late 1960s and 1970s in Nicosia and Sydney, The Art In My Palm is a poignant, contemporary Greek Tragedy depicting the utter disintegration of an immigrant family, a mother’s desolate struggle to keep her family together and a teenage boy’s dogged determination to overcome his traumas, embrace his emerging sexuality and achieve his dreams.
