The Great Cyprus Think Tank is narrated by Bart Beasley, a dejected Canadian author of cultural memoirs who yearns to return to Cyprus, where he spent his youth and where he might shake off his ennui. He forms a think tank of renowned but flawed experts to tackle crises still besetting the fabled island in 2024. The birthplace of Aphrodite is parched, its famed sea turtles face extinction, its songbirds are swallowed whole by native epicures, and Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, if no longer dispatching one another, rarely send over a bottle of wine. A string of felicitous adventures and seeming successes follows, while romantic liaisons spring up within the think tank’s ranks. Where else but in Cyprus could the Fellows hope to unearth Pygmalion’s ancient showgirl sculpture of Aphrodite in time for Kataklysmós, an annual celebration of Noah’s flood when Cypriots take to the sea and flirtatiously splash one another? Unknown to all but alert readers is a counterplot to waylay the think tank’s best designs.

LARRY LOCKRIDGE is a writer living in New York City. Professor Emeritus of English, New York University, and a Guggenheim Fellow, he is best known for the award-winning biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County. The Woman in Green is the last of four standalone yet interrelated, novels, The Enigma Quartet, to be published by Iguana Books. It was launched January 5th, 2023, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1948 publication of Raintree County, to which it is indirectly an homage.

Larry Lockridge's profile page

Marcia Scanlong, painter, sculptor and poet, has studios in Soho and Upstate New York. She has been represented by John Stoller, Gettler-Paul, Maxwell Davidson, and Central Booking. Her artwork is in personal, corporate, library, and museum collections here and abroad. A solo exhibition of paintings based on the Greek alphabet and Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a reading from her Poems, Mythological were held at The House of Arts & Letters, Larnaca, Cyprus.

Marcia Scanlon's profile page