Skip to content
A few pages from Rosa's Eyes, ahead of publication.
From the Prologue — "Rosa"
She was born on an island in the Ionian Sea, into a world of olive groves and Orthodox bells and the particular blue light that falls on the Greek islands in the long afternoons of summer. The sea was always present — in the air, in the light, in the way sound carried differently there, as though the water gave every word a longer life. Her name was Rosa Antoniou Cassimati.
...
Rosa Antoniou Cassimati was not a footnote. She was not a casualty. She was the origin of everything that follows in these pages — the mother, the face, the eyes that kept appearing, generation after generation, in the people who came from her without knowing her name.
She deserves to be remembered. This book remembers her.
— from the Prologue
From Part One: The World That Broke Her
Before any of this — before Kythera, before Rosa, before the long unravelling — Charles Bushe Hearn was, by every account that survives him, genuinely compelling: good-looking, clever, a smart officer, handling sword or song with equal dexterity, singing an Irish or Italian love song with a melodious tenor voice. This was the man Rosa Cassimati chose on Kythera, against her family's wishes, at the cost of everything she had. He was not cold then. Whatever he became, he was not cold then.
— from Part One: The World That Broke Her
From Part Three: The Son Who Kept Reaching
In his room hung a Greek icon of the Virgin and Child — of the type Greek Orthodox tradition calls Glykophilousa, the sweetly-kissing Panagia, mother and child pictured cheek to cheek. Nobody told him what to make of it. He decided, privately, that the Virgin was his mother, and the Child was himself. It was an image he saw himself into, alone, with no audience and no instruction — a small boy in a cold Dublin house inventing his own icon of a mother he could not remember, years before he ever wrote a word professionally.
— from Part Three: The Son Who Kept Reaching
From Part Four: The Son Who Kept Her Secret
James Daniel Hearn was born on the Greek island of Cephalonia on 12 August 1854, in the first weeks after his mother Rosa returned there — by one account, born on the way to Cerigo, her home island, as if he could not wait even for the journey to finish.
— from Part Four: The Son Who Kept Her Secret
Rosa's Eyes will be available soon. Get in touch to hear when: