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Three years ago, in the depths of the Covid pandemic, I started writing a novel. It was a time when travel was forbidden and so, from my kitchen table, I took a trip two and a half thousand miles away to Turkey, and a place called Bodrum — some of you may know it.
In my twenties I lived there, it was an unusual place to end up, a strange sounding language to get stuck in the head of this sarı kızı— this blonde haired girl.
The year before that had seen a huge change in my life, my father had been ill for many years after a series of strokes left him disabled and he had died of a massive heart attack just nine months after I had married the boy from the village where I had grown up. Something about realising my own mortality had made me understand I needed to leave this new husband, to swap him for an adventure in the world.
It had devasta…