Interview with Eva Asprakis, author of Ghost Flight
In conversation with Matthew Phillip Long at Hambis Municipal Printmaking Museum Nicosia, 26 June 2025
Interviewee: Eva Asprakis
Interviewer: Matthew Phillip Long
Date of Interview: 26 June 2025
Location of Interview: Hambis Municipal Printmaking Museum Nicosia
Matthew: Congratulations on the publication of Ghost Flight, your third novel. In your own words, and for those who haven’t read the book, can you give us an overview of Ghost Flight in terms of its plot and themes?
Eva: Thank you. Yes. So, Ghost Flight is set in and around Larnaca, in 2005. It is the story of two couples, who are also friends, trying to piece their relationships back together in the wake of one character’s long-awaited return to Cyprus – with a British girlfriend. The book follows these characters as they try to reconcile their personal and political pasts with the lives they are living now, and with the futures they may or may not want to have. Looming over all this is the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster, which, of course, took place in August of that year.
Matthew: One of the fascinating elements in this novel is your use of structure. There are four protagonists, each given their own section. The reader gets to spend time with each character separately, to understand their relationships with each other and the emotional weight of their histories. Could you discuss this decision to have four separate sections rather than one narrative with a single protagonist, as in your previous work?
Eva: Ghost Flight is set at a time of real change in Cyprus. Between 2003 and 2005, the country opened its first crossing point between north and south, joined the European Union, and voted on the Annan Plan for reunification. To portray those events, and others, in a nuanced way, I felt that I needed access to a range of perspectives. To show that our opinions are shaped by our personal experiences, and that we are none of us right or wrong so much as differently predisposed.
Matthew: You use planes and flights as a metaphor consistently throughout this novel. Plane watching. Arrivals and departures. Leaving and returning. Journeys and destinations, both literal and metaphorical. Why did you use planes and flights for each character as a mechanism to tell this story?
Eva: All the characters in this story feel stuck, within themselves or their lives. Air travel, the act of going away and starting afresh, struck me as a physical representation of what they were yearning for emotionally. Of equal importance to this story are the flights not taken. These lost loves and forsaken opportunities haunt the characters, making Flight 522 far from the only ‘ghost flight’ in the book.
Matthew: Yes. As you’ve mentioned, Ghost Flight culminates with the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster. As a writer of fiction, I am interested in understanding why you chose a real-life and relatively recent tragedy rather than something fictitious. What was it about the Helios Airways Flight 522 disaster that felt important to the telling of this story?
Eva: At the time of the tragedy, my parents and I were in Cyprus visiting family. We were due to fly back to London the following day, with Helios Airways. I was a child, so the pleas of friends and relatives for us not to get on the plane felt very alarming, and I have been afraid of flying ever since. Often, fear is the emotion that drives my writing, and so I think it was inevitable that an event so close to home which sparked that emotion in me would influence my work.
Matthew: Ghost Flight was released in May 2025 and has already received very positive reviews from readers. You have also had two successful book launches, one in Salamina, Greece and the other in Nicosia. I am curious about how the use of such a tragedy, especially in Cyprus where the memories of the Flight 522 disaster remain vivid, has been received. Did you have any concerns about the novel’s reception or reservations about its publication?
Eva: Initially, I was unsure how people might respond to the book, particularly those who had lost loved ones in the Flight 522 tragedy. But I prefaced the book with a quote – “commemoration is resistance to defeat the ugliness of death” – from Michalis Hadjipantelas at the Helios Airways Disaster Memorial 2024, and have had several readers echo this sentiment.
Matthew: To me, this is a work with rich and complex characters, but language is the backbone of the story. I want to ask you about the craft of writing Ghost Flight. In such a compelling novel, you risk the language you have used being overlooked, but it is beautiful and feels very intentional. Each section has a different tone and rhythm. Each character has a distinctive voice. I’m sure every writer out there will appreciate how hard that is to do, but you have made it feel effortless. Did you prepare for that in terms of your writing process?
Eva: Thank you. That wasn’t something I prepared for consciously. I don’t think I needed to because, as a child of divorce and someone who grew up with extended families from three different cultures, I’d been adapting my own tone and rhythm to my surroundings for a lifetime. By viewing each of Ghost Flight’s characters as another ‘environment’, I was able to do a similar thing on the page.
Matthew: In each of the four perspectives, the use of italics for Greek and English dialogue changes depending on who is receiving the language. This isn’t something I have come across before and it made me pause on my first reading. Of course, it makes perfect sense, but it forces the reader to reflect on their own biases around language. Can you explain your use of italics in Ghost Flight?
Eva: Yes. My decision to play with the italics actually came out of a conversation with my editor. I sent him a draft of Ghost Flight with all its Greek- and Russian-language words italicized, and he asked me if I was sure I wanted to keep them that way, given the debate about whether it was a form of othering to italicize foreign-language words in English literature. I thought about this and concluded that it shouldn’t be about which languages I deemed ‘other’. Ghost Flight is a story entirely about the subjectiveness of what is foreign and who is an outsider, and so the italicized language changes in each character’s section. It reflects their view.
Matthew: This feels like a book about endings. It is rich in the language of loss and mourning, although not necessarily for those departed. Is this a novel about grief?
Eva: That’s a good question. As you’ve mentioned, Ghost Flight is structured so that we don’t see the immediate aftermath of the Flight 522 disaster. It doesn’t detail the emotional impact on any characters who lose loved ones, and so is not about grief as readers might expect. Having said that, the book does detail grief in its more mundane forms. The forms we feel for unrealized dreams, lost loves and former selves. And so, in that way, yes, this is a novel about grief.
Matthew: Your last novel, Thirty-Eight Days of Rain, was very successful. It won the 2024 Ink Book Prize for Fiction and led to you being named by Ever-Growing as an Emerging Author to Watch in 2025. While Thirty-Eight Days of Rain reads like a very personal work, Ghost Flight feels like a departure, more of an exercise in a writer exploring and trying to answer questions. Was there a deliberate intention to detach from the explicitly personal?
Eva: After Thirty-Eight Days of Rain – which, as you’ve said, was intensely personal and dark – I wrote another book that was intensely personal and dark. It exhausted me, working on those stories back-to-back. I put the second one aside and set out to write something more outward-looking which, perhaps inevitably, ended up just as dark. But the intention was there to do something different, yes.
Matthew: Do you think Ghost Flight could exist without Thirty-Eight Days of Rain or your debut novel, Love and Only Water?
Eva: No. Ghost Flight reads as it does because I wrote it as a rejection of Thirty-Eight Days of Rain, just as I wrote Thirty-Eight Days of Rain – even more explicitly – as a rejection of Love and Only Water. For me, each book is a correction of the failures I see in my last one.
Matthew: Looking at your body of work, a label I often see associated with you is that of ‘Confessional Writer’. This is a relatively new term and one that I have reservations about. Do you worry about it, or does it offer you some protection or comfort?
Eva: I also have mixed feelings about this label. My instinct to write close to home was one that I felt sheepish about, like I was doing something strange or wrong, until I learned about the history of Confessional Writing as a movement. Then I felt that there was some validity in my taking ownership of the work I was doing, and I really embraced that with Thirty-Eight Days of Rain. Pitched as a confessional work, the book seemed more brave than scandalous. The downside is that, while any book is a moment in time for its author, readers may judge them on it forever.
Matthew: Eva Asprakis, thank you very much.
Eva: Thank you, Matthew, for your time.