The Sunrise

The Sunrise is the most magnificent hotel in Famagusta — marble floors, a pool that seems to merge with the Mediterranean, a clientele that includes film stars and politicians. It is 1972, Cyprus is a republic of ten years, and the Georgious family, who own The Sunrise, and the Özkan family, their closest friends, Turkish Cypriots who manage the hotel’s restaurant, live in the particular way that communities living together do: with friction and love, with arguments and celebration, in a city where Greek and Turkish, Christian and Muslim have coexisted for centuries.

Then comes the summer of 1974. The coup backed by the Greek military junta; the Turkish invasion in response; the occupation of northern Cyprus; and the evacuation of Famagusta — in which 40,000 Greek Cypriots fled in a single day, leaving their city intact, their tables still set, their cars still parked, to return in days (they believed) when the situation was resolved. Fifty years later, the city is still empty, still frozen in that August morning, fenced off behind barbed wire.

The Sunrise is Hislop’s most explicitly political novel — a portrait of what political conflict does to communities that have lived together, told through two families whose friendship is the casualty of events they did not choose.

Reading Guides

• Victoria Hislop Books in Order
• Where to Start with Victoria Hislop

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Sunrise apart: The Famagusta setting — and its ghost-town aftermath — is haunting; The political dimension of the Cyprus conflict is handled with unusual balance; and The friendship across ethnic lines is the novel’s emotional core. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Sunrise give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Famagusta as a ghost city — frozen in 1974, still unresolved. The Cyprus conflict as a wound that has not healed. Friendship across ethnic and political division. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Victoria Hislop’s prose in The Sunrise is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The hotel setting occasionally tips toward glamour at the expense of complexity. The resolution is less emotionally satisfying than The Island. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers visiting Cyprus; fans of Mediterranean historical fiction; Hislop readers

Famagusta’s Abandoned Quarter

The ghost city of Varosha — the modern resort district of Famagusta — is one of the most extraordinary and melancholy places in the eastern Mediterranean. Before 1974 it was the most glamorous holiday destination in Cyprus, its beachfront hotels attracting film stars and European tourists. When the Turkish army advanced on Famagusta in August 1974, the Greek Cypriot population of 40,000 fled in a single day, expecting to return within days. Instead, the Turkish military sealed Varosha behind barbed wire, and it has remained closed ever since — fifty years of abandonment, the buildings slowly collapsing, the cars rusting, the hotels still furnished.

Hislop’s Sunrise hotel stands in this history as the novel’s central symbol: a place of beauty and pleasure that is, in the space of a few hours, converted into a monument to political failure. The novel’s achievement is to have made the ghost city emotionally legible — not as an abstract political dispute but as a loss experienced by specific people, the Georgious and Özkan families, whose friendship is destroyed by events they did not choose.

The Cyprus Problem

The Cyprus conflict — referred to diplomatically as the “Cyprus Problem” — is one of the unresolved geopolitical disputes of the post-war period. The island has been divided since 1974, with the northern third under Turkish Cypriot control and, since 1983, declared the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (recognised only by Turkey). Negotiations over reunification have continued intermittently for fifty years without resolution.

Hislop handles this with unusual care. The novel is not pro-Greek or pro-Turkish in its sympathies: it insists on the reality of friendship across ethnic and political lines, and on the tragedy of its destruction, without assigning blame in the unilateral way that partisan accounts of the events do. This balance is one of the novel’s most admirable qualities, and explains why it has been read sympathetically by both Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

Hislop’s Cyprus and Her Greece

The Sunrise was the novel in which Hislop most explicitly engaged with the contemporary political implications of her Mediterranean settings, as distinct from the purely historical. The abandoned Varosha still exists as she describes it; the families who fled still cannot return; the resolution she imagines at the novel’s end remains, in reality, unachieved. Reading the novel as a visitor to Cyprus, or as someone with any connection to the island, is to experience the particular poignancy of historical fiction that has not yet become history.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A portrait of Cyprus before and during the 1974 invasion — Hislop at her most politically engaged, using two families to trace how war destroys communities that have lived together.