Mother Land is an autobiographical novel, a minutely remembered description of childhood on an Aegean island, marked by the furious opposition of hostile yet neighbouring cultures. Dmetri Kakmi was born into an age-old Greek community on the now-Turkish island of Bozcaada in the early 1960s. His nine-year-old self tries to make sense of the escalating tension between Greek and Turk, Muslim and Christian, just as he tries to understand the violence between his cosmopolitan mother and his fisherman father. Before the family emigrates to Australia, leaving behind their beautiful, if impoverished, homeland, he reveals with chilling clarity how violence begets violence, in even the most unexpected of people. Returning as an adult to try to make sense of his experience and to make peace with the past, Dmetri Kakmi uncovers a number of family secrets and the final pieces of the jigsaw fall into place.