MAUREEN FREELY (b.1952)
Sailing through Byzantium. Edinburgh: Linen Press 2013.
First edition, signed on the title and generously annotated with 2,011 words on 97 pages. Drawing on Freely's own childhood, Sailing through Byzantium is a thriller set in Istanbul in the early 1960s, as observed through the eyes of nine-year-old American child, Mimi. It was a Sunday Times Book of the Year for 2013. Freely's annotations, opening with 'apologies for my handwriting. I reread this book while travelling ... It seemed appropriate', are at times deeply personal, recording the roots of the novel in her own Istanbul childhood and especially in the personality and 'beautiful lies' of her mother ('I have my mother to thank for the art of fiction'), contrasting those memories with the present and reflecting on her choice of fiction rather than memoir as a form, and how her childhood left her with 'no choice but to make a life in fiction'. An annotation at the end of the novel links past and present, the novel and her own life, in a particularly personal way: 'The day I wrote those words I picked up the phone to tell my mother. But I felt tired. I decided to wait till morning. That evening, 17th March 2012, she slipped & fell, dying three & a half years later, never having come out of her coma. And – the day I wrote to Lynn, who'd expressed an interest in this novel, my husband was upstairs, unbeknownst to me, dying of a brain hemorrhage'. Printed copies of photographs of Freely's mother, father and family are loosely inserted.

Octavo. Original pictorial card wrappers.

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