Böcker utgivna av Armida Publications Ltd

Avoiding nationalistic rhetoric and bombast, the novel describes Cyprus accurately as poised on the edge of Europe, intrinsically a part of it, yet treading a thin line between East and West. It describes the weakness of nations and individuals at times of chaos. It makes the story of Cyprus at the end of empire clear and present as never before.

What happens when a small town where everyone knows each other finds itself in the middle of a mystery? A wave of unexplainable robberies rolls over the town's favourite establishments and Mel, a full-time bakery owner and now part-time amateur sleuth, expects little to no help from the town's police force.

The life stories Annetta Benzar has collected and retold here celebrate a country that is full of diversity, and in which there is a tale from a different part of the world around every corner.

The Seamstress of Ourfa richly recreates the culture of the Armenian community in Ourfa at the tail end of the Ottoman Empire.The eponymous seamstress, Khatoun, creates beautiful dresses that leave her customers' husbands dizzy with desire, while her sister in law Ferida cooks sumptuous feasts to sustain a growing and lovingly described group of relatives and the waifs and strays they adopt.The author creates a finely textured sense of family, only slowly making the reader aware that the date is creeping nearer to 1915 and the genocide of the Armenian people in Turkey. When the horrendous events of those years start to unfold, the traditions and lives of the Armenian people are slowly yet inexorably torn apart. The Seamstress of Ourfa does not shy away from the painful realities of those years, but manages to maintain a sense of cultural continuity into the 1960's, where the author's surviving family reunite in Nicosia, Cyprus.

Paul lives a basic life focusing on just getting by from moment to moment, day to day. The man who pays for his up-keep makes sure he has the basics, but only the basics, on which to live. Paul is unsure why this patron keeps him at all. In truth, he doesn't understand much, nor does he want to. Ignorance is his way of life; being unaware his default mode. He might even be happy if he were just left alone.Paul's backer is having an affair, but what does his wife know about it? Paul is given a mission to find out and is forced to become an unwilling private detective. Not knowing what he is doing, nor why, he is plunged into a world filled with eccentrics: the extraordinarily ordinary private detective, Mr Samuels; Cassandra, the patron's wife, who seems caught in a 1930s novel; the mistress whose odd-coloured eyes are perhaps the least disturbing thing about her. But the real mystery might be Paul himself: who is he really? Why is he a kept man? Why can't he cope with any of the people and things forced upon him? Told with great energy and urgency, Of People and Things is at once a comic mystery story, similar to the works of Will Self or a comic Cormac McCarthy, but also a strangely unsettling and moving novel as uncanny moments pile upon each other to test the hapless narrator's attempts to understand just what is going on.