«The Crescent Moon Fox» by Murat Metin

The Crescent Moon Fox is a compassionate, heart-breaking, brutal, and occasionally, humorous, novel about Cypriot Turks. The reader experiences the lives of the inhabitants of one particular village during the lead-up to Independence from Britain and the tragic aftermath of the post-Colonial era in Cyprus — and in particular, of two of its young men: Zeki and Aydin. Zeki who, shaped and nurtured by the British Colonial system, is destined for great things; and Aydin, a misfit in his community who, in his own complex and disturbing way, achieves greatness and redemption.

The span of the novel is from the nineteen thirties to the first decade of the twenty first century — showing the life of the Cypriot Turks, unique and distinct as a minority, in the lead-up to Independence and to what they become in the modern era. It gives a voice to Cypriot Turks, of all different backgrounds, and particularly to the illiterate rural women of the Colonial Era. The Crescent Moon Fox is also a poignant journey of discovery of one's true identity…

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Metin Murat has chosen the trickiest of terrains for setting and characterisation in The Crescent Moon Fox. Greek Cypriot — Turkish Cypriot remain unsettled and the politics neuralgic but his story and the people who inhabit it break through all that. I cannot recommend it too highly.

—Matthew Parris | columnist with The Times and The Spectator

[…] I found this novel quite a page-turner; it never loses itself in “issues” so as to forget that novels are essentially about people, and the lure of “what happens next” to the various characters in whom the reader has become interested is strong. So I don’t want to go too much into plot details. But one thing I really like is the novel’s refusal to provide glib solutions to the problems it raises. People become personally close to individuals of the other community, yet this does not change their attitude to “the other” in general, nor prevent them from participating in atrocities against them. […]

—Sheenagh Pugh | British poet, novelist and translator