Born in Nottingham, Eve Makis worked as a journalist before turning to fiction. She is the author of five novels published by Transworld and Sandstone Press, including The Spice Box Letters, shortlisted for the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize and the East Midlands Book Award. She co-wrote the award-winning film Boy on the Bridge and co-authored the life writing guide The Accidental Memoir (HarperCollins). Eve is a fiction tutor on the MA Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. She is co-creator of the life writing website the Minute Memoir. Her latest novel, Where the Earth Holds Secrets, is published by Claret Press.
Set on the divided island of Cyprus, Where the Earth Holds Secrets follows Nuray, a risk-taking journalist known for uncovering the hidden graves of the missing. When she reaches out to Haris with new information about his father’s disappearance, she pulls him into a past Haris has long tried to avoid.
The case is blown open with the arrival of Elena Clayton, an English forensic archaeologist seeking a fresh start, whose work begins to uncover secrets buried deep beneath the island’s soil. As Nuray, Haris, and Elena are drawn together, they must navigate suspicion, betrayal, and their own tangled histories.
Inspired by the writer’s own family history and the work of inspirational journalist Sevgul Uludag, the book reflects on Cyprus’s unresolved past, tracing a path through loss and remembrance toward the possibility of healing.
You can read more about Where the Earth Holds Secrets on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening of the novel.
From Where the Earth Holds Secrets
Chapter 1
Cyprus 2016
Nuray had promised herself: No More Investigations.
But the case of the missing man had found its way into her life one sunlit afternoon in Yusef’s coffee shop as she lingered over a square of walnut baklava. An old man had leaned in close, his breath warm at her ear. ‘Nuray Hasan,’ he’d whispered. ‘I have something for you. The name of a witness. An address.’
And just like that, she was back on the hunt.
The sun scorched the battered bonnet of her Fiat Punto as she drove along the Karpas Peninsula, an elongated finger of land that gave the island its distinctive shape. The road cut through parched fields where white-bellied donkeys roamed like Holy cattle. Cicadas droned in the stillness, like the murmur of missing souls.
The man she was searching for was a cold case. Like so many others who had disappeared during the island’s troubled years, in the fifties and sixties, in 1974 when Cyprus was invaded. Soldiers, civilians, woman and children, newborns too. She’d heard stories of people being dragged from their homes at night, marched off buses, even snatched from hospital beds. Their names were spoken at family gatherings, at official committees, in dark corners and with nighttime prayers.
The Cypriot dust streamed through the open window, clinging to her skin like cheap glitter. It was everywhere – on her clothes, in her hair, under her eyelids, scratching her eyes. A fig tree loomed ahead, pale and weathered, its trunk whitewashed to protect it from the heat. Turn right at the white-washed fig, the old man had written on a napkin in Yusef’s café. In all her years of searching, trees had helped to signpost the way. Cypress, acacia, carobs and wild olives guiding her through remote stretches where farmers still ploughed with cart and horse.
She had begun her career in journalism writing about fetes and festivals, petty thefts and the slow rhythm of local news. Then she had started investigating the disappearances. No one called them murder victims. At least, not at that point.
Her research had led her to yellowing archives, old photographs, to grieving mothers and unmarked graves. Her curiosity about the missing had turned into a burden, yes, but a mission too, a passion that gave her life meaning. It was one thing to write about tragedy from a distance; quite another to connect with the victims, to play a role in solving age-old mysteries.
