When grief brings you home to Cyprus

I started reading Matthew Philip Long’s debut novella a couple of months after my mother passed away. And I had to stop. Set in Cyprus, Life Goes on Without You and Me follows a man returning to the island of his birth after his mother’s death, searching for traces of her in the land she once loved. Grief, memory, belonging – he writes about all of it with a rare eloquence that left me breathless, capturing what none of us can escape: loss.

“There was never any intention for anyone else to...