Mother Land is a memoir by Melbourne writer Dmetri Kakmi, about his childhood in the late 1960s on the island of Bozcaada in the Aegean Sea, at the entrance to the Dardanelle Straits, at a time when political tensions between Greece and Turkey were at their peak, and the island’s Greek population was subject to intimidation by its Turkish government. Finally his family is forced to flee the island and to migrate to Australia. Years later, the adult Dmitri returns in the hope of making peace with the past.

The book is about the loss of the child’s island paradise, and the complications of his Greco-Turkish heritage – but it is also a tribute to the two women who loom over his early years, his mother Galatea and cousin Athena, and the consequence of ethnic and religious prejudice on their lives. To be launched by Arnold Zable.

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