The Red Horse

A collection of eighteen evocative short stories traces intimate journeys through landscapes of memory, migration, longing, and resilience, blending lyricism with raw honesty to illuminate the beauty and complexity of everyday life. Each story explores moments of reckoning—personal, familial, and historical—while capturing flashes of humor, tenderness, and the dignity that resides in ordinary experience. Like the entire oeuvre of award-winning Kyriacos Efthymiou, this collection condenses the existential drama of humanity. In a constant agon with language itself, it lays bare the author’s incessant battles with expression, while stirring up traumas and old wounds, and awakening silence, with all that entails. Born in the Occupied Territory of a Cyprus divided since the 1974 Turkish invasion, Kyriacos Efthymiou always carries the burden of sorrow and the displacement of the refugee, something that is also amply reflected in these short stories. This edition features translations by Barbara Danis, Peter Bottéas, and Vassiliki Rapti, with revisions by Peter Bottéas, reflecting meticulous attention to voice and atmosphere. At its heart, the book contemplates truth and silence, love and exile, and the quiet resistance found in lives shaped by hope and suffering.