Within those shadows, I sensed that there were stories worth bringing to light. Eva Asprakis’ Ghost Flight is set against a backdrop of the Helios crash

Ghost Flight by Eva Asprakis explores a “time of new beginnings” amid the “horrifying contrast” of abrupt loss brought about by the doomed Helios Airways flight in 2005 that saw 121 people die.

Through the complex lives of four people, Eva tells a haunting and heartbreaking story.

High-school sweethearts Aristos and Agathi, and Petros and Melina, are the best of friends until Aristos declares he is leaving Cyprus for university. Seven years later, Aristos returns with his new girlfriend, Wendy, to find Petros and Melina engaged, and Agathi still hung up on him.

As the estranged friends become reacquainted, their worlds come apart. All of them have wrongs to right, but with Cyprus hurtling towards the worst aviation disaster in its history, they might have less time than they think.

“At the time of the Helios tragedy, my parents and I had been in Cyprus visiting family and were due to fly back to London the following day, with Helios Airways. I was an anxious child, and so the fear expressed by friends and relatives before we boarded that flight stuck with me,” Eva recalls.

Speaking to the Cyprus Mail, Eva says, “Looking back, I found it haunting that a plane – full of young families and students – should have met the fate that flight 522 did, when the act of flying is, inherently, such a hopeful one. Whether towards something exciting or away from something exhausting, we fly with the optimism that wherever we land, things are going to be better.

Eva Asprakis

“To think of life ending, at the height of that optimism, made everything seem so futile. I felt I had to explore – what does it look like to search for meaning in life when we know that in the end, it ends?” she adds.

Eva says early 21st-century Cyprus served as an interesting backdrop to this, because it was a time of such significant change. Between 2003 and 2005 when Ghost Flight is set, the country opened its first crossing point, joined the European Union and held a vote on the Annan Plan for reunification.

“It looked like a time of beginnings until, in horrifying contrast, the Helios tragedy brought so many lives to an end. Within those shadows, I sensed that there were stories worth bringing to light,” Eva says.

“For me, Ghost Flight is an examination of time, the mystery of how much we have left and the importance of how we choose to spend it.”

Although the characters aren’t aware of the fate that awaits them, the reader can see it looming. Rather than unpacking the grief that will, inevitably, follow the Helios crash, the story looks at the urgency that preludes it, to live and to love.

“The dilemma confronted by the main characters, the two couples, comes from some very real questions of mine,” Eva says.

“Petros and Melina have been together since they were teenagers and struggle with their respective paths not taken, while Aristos and Wendy met several years older and must contend with the longer, more complex histories that they have each accumulated.”

There were no specific real-life inspirations for these characters, although stories of both high-school sweethearts and studies abroad are common in Cyprus. “Ghost Flight stems from a place of emotional truth, rather than fact,” Eva says.

Eva has written two other books: Thirty-Eight Days of Rain and Love and Only Water. The former won the Ink Book Prize for Fiction 2024.

In it, Androulla is 24 and newly married when she learns she is infertile. In a bid for Cypriot citizenship, she is undergoing adoption by her stepfather and wondering if she will have to adopt a child one day herself.

As this reality sets in, Androulla’s marriage unravels. Between migration departments and doctors’ appointments, she must question what it means to be from somewhere, what it means to be a woman and, when an impossible choice presents itself, which of those things means the most to her.

Love and Only Water is about 21-year-old Daniela who, in the midst of an identity crisis, retraces her roots to Cyprus. As whispers sound through her grandparents’ home, she senses their anguish at Turkey’s invasion, still as raw as it was almost 50 years ago. Then her aunt invites her across the border for a picnic.

Beyond the buffer zone she runs into Beyza, who was her girlfriend five years ago when they both lived in London. Now, with Daniela in the south and Beyza in the north, everything is different. Faiths conflict. Perceptions collide. The divided island unravels alongside a war-fractured family.

Eva is currently working on a fourth novel, which she expects to release next year.

“I believe I am about a quarter of the way into my fourth novel, although the ending seems to stretch further away from me with every chapter. It feels like my most ambitious work yet, examining with greater understanding and honesty the shapes that grief, love and identity can take within Cyprus.”

“All being well, I expect to release it in 2026.”

Ghost Flight is available in eBook and paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other online booksellers, as well as select bookshops in Cyprus