Tunnel of Hope…Past and Present
Dear Friends,
Welcome to November’s Substack.
I hope you’ll enjoy this month’s blog Tunnel of Hope…Past and Present. The audio version is available by clicking the link in the blog or clicking the link here for all podcasts. https://joanneleedomackerman.substack.com/podcast
Book News shares information, appearances, awards, and interviews on my latest novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert.
The Writer at Risk section this month focuses on publisher and activist Osman Kavala sentenced to life in prison without parole in Turkey.
The Books to Check Out section shares two classics—Graham Greene’s 1950s novella The Third Man and an earlier thriller The Confidential Agent.
In the Scene section you’ll find a photo, along with text, from my novel Burning Distance, and Words of the Month share a couple of words you may not use but might like to know, including one from Graham Green’s The Third Man.
Thank you to everyone who has come to bookstores, libraries, book clubs and online for my novels Burning Distance and The Far Side of the Desert. Word of mouth is what sells books so thank you for spreading the word!
If you’re interested in having me speak at a venue or with a book club, click here. Thank you too for reading and sharing this free monthly Substack On the Yellow Brick Road. I hope you’ll stay in touch!
Tunnel of Hope…Past and Present
Wars end, eventually.
In the middle of war, the end is hard to imagine, and the aftermath unpredictable—devastation restored, justice reconciled, the younger generation taking over…or not? At the moment focus and hope is on a possible peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestinians. In Syria citizens are also in a suspended state of optimistic but cautious hope and skepticism after 13 years of civil war. Other areas of the globe remain locked in conflict.
Recently I returned for a 30th anniversary of the Siege of Sarajevo. During the nine-year Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999) as the country broke up, Serbian forces surrounded the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, blockading it and cutting off food, water, gas, heat, all power, and weapons. Shelling Sarajevo from the surrounding hills 24 hours a day, dropping over 500,000 bombs, Serbia’s 13,000-man force tried to break the will of the citizens, but the Bosnians refused to give up.
Digging for four months, they built an 800-meter tunnel from the airport where the United Nations had control. Through the Tunnel of Hope Bosnians managed to ferry supplies into the city. I remember a Slovenian writer and colleague of mine in International PEN who ran that gauntlet more than once with funds and supplies donated from writers around the world for our colleagues in Sarajevo.
Lasting from April 1992 to February 1996, the Siege of Sarajevo was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and the longest siege of a capital city in modern history.
Last month I arrived for a 30th anniversary board meeting of the International Crisis Group, which was born out of that conflict when three international professionals envisioned an organization that could put top researchers on the ground to discern truth from propaganda and work with a board of high level ex-presidents, foreign ministers and diplomats from around the world who could advise and pass on suggested actions and also operate as a backchannel. Though I’ve never served in government, I was active with nongovernmental organizations and asked to join the board from the second board meeting of the International Crisis Group. I served for 22 years and got a global education in the process. The October 2025 board meeting in Sarajevo was a reunion for many of us and reminded us that even out of one of the worst conflicts, peace can be born.
The day before our gathering, I arrived in Sarajevo and had a guide take me around. Thirty years ago he had been a student and an athlete, a runner, but like most young men he joined the resistance and special forces. He lost part of his leg in the conflict, but he worked for the resistance the whole four years. He lost half of his friends in the conflict.
“We fought and worked in six-hour shifts, then slept six hours, then spent six hours protecting the churches, synagogues and mosques,” he said. Sarajevo took pride in being an ecumenical city where all religions were welcome, he explained.
He told me that when the siege started, he lived at home where his mother loved books and reading and had a library of over 1000 volumes. When the siege was over, she had only two books left because the family had to burn the books for fuel. They also burned their floorboards.
Sarajevo has been largely restored now with modern buildings, hotels, and shopping malls, but some of the bombed-out buildings and those shot with mortars are left standing along the roadside and highways as reminders. The memories abide. How the population functions with those memories a generation later is an ongoing story.
Before the war, Bosnia had Christians, Muslims and Jews, Serbs, Croats and Bosnians all living together. That easier peace has not returned, but there is no more violence of war, and the peace is a daily job.
Sarajevo has a unique history in Europe and the world, for it is also here that the spark for the First World War was lit with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Shot by a Serbian nationalist in 1914, the Archduke’s murder heightened existing tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and led to an ultimatum then declaration of war. This triggered a complex system of alliances that ultimately brought the major European powers into war.
“People don’t want conflict,” insisted my guide, now a father himself. But how to keep the peace is up to each of us, he said.
I’m honored that The Far Side of the Desert (Oceanview Publishing) was named a finalist in the Suspense category for the 2025 National Indie Excellence Awards. The novel was also awarded the 2025 Bronze medal in the Suspense/Thriller category by the Independent Publishers Association (IPPY) Book Awards.
Published in 2024, The Far Side of the Desert was released in paperback April, 2025. I hope you’ll order, read and enjoy. If you’ve already read the hardcover, I hope you’ll buy the paperback and give to friends!
"The Far Side of the Desert is a riveting thriller with richly nuanced characters and fast-paced action. The plot imaginatively taps into recent history to illustrate the human dimensions of terrorism—both the complex psyche of the perpetrators and the gnawing questions among those sucked into their vortex. I binged until the end.”
—Robin Wright, author of Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion across the Islamic World
Burning Distance (Oceanview Publishing, 2023 and paperback in 2024) was honored by the 2024 American Book Fest International Book Awards as a Finalist in the Best Mystery/Suspense and Thriller/Adventure categories.
“Politics abound in Joanne Leedom-Ackerman’s superb historical thriller Burning Distance (Oceanview). The book is steeped in tragedy too, as young Elizabeth West’s life is further uprooted in the wake of her father’s death when the family relocates from Washington, D.C. to London…. At its heart, Burning Distance is a love story, but it has the soul of a political thriller as it weaves in the events leading up to the Gulf War of the 1990-91 Gulf war. Ambitious in scope and beautifully realized.”
—Jon Land, Book Trib
Thanks to Monica Hadley and Writers Voices for the recent interview about The Far Side of the Desert. You can listen here.
Selected recordings of past events and interviews:
Interview with Monica Hadley, Writers Voices
Strategies for Living Podcast: Finding Resilience Through Story
Interview with Janeane Bernstein on NPR’s KUCI, Get the Funk Out!
Book Launch for Akram Aylisli's People and Trees with Plamen Press
Why Baldwin Matters Series, The Alan Cheuse International Writers Center
Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville, NC
Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City with Salil Tripathi
Baum on Books on WSHU Public Radio
Interview with Anna Roins of Authorlink
Interview with Deborah Kalb
For more podcasts, videos and interviews, click here
Osman Kavala (Turkey)
(Sources include PEN International, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, BBC, and Bianet)
Sentenced to life in prison without parole in Turkey, Osman Kavala, publisher, philanthropist and activist, has already spent eight years in prison for alleged relations with the Gülen movement and the Gezi park protests in 2013.
First detained in 2017 at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport, he was accused of being “a business tycoon with a shady background” and having contacts with the “Gülenist Terror Group” (FETÖ). He was arrested, along with others including journalist Can Dündar and actor Memet Ali Alabora, and charged with being a mastermind behind the Gezi Park protests as an “attempt to overthrow the government through violence.” The indictment also alleged that philanthropist George Soros was behind the conspiracy. Kavala was a founding member of Soros’ Open Society Foundations in Turkey.
The verdict in the Gezi Trial acquitted Osman Kavala; however, hours after the acquittal, the chief prosecutor demanded his continued detention. He was re-arrested on another charge and again acquitted, but re-arrested a third time for “securing information that, due to its nature, must be kept confidential for reasons relating to the security or domestic or foreign political interests of the State, for the purpose of political or military espionage.”
In March 2020 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Kavala’s favor and demanded his immediate release, asserting that there was not sufficient evidence to support the accusations and that “the prosecution’s attitude could be considered such as to confirm the applicant’s assertion that the measures taken against him pursued an ulterior purpose, namely to reduce him to silence as an NGO activist and human-rights defender, to dissuade other persons from engaging in such activities and to paralyze civil society in the country.”
The Turkish government ignored the two rulings by the European Court of Human Rights. The demand for Kavala’s release was supported by ten embassies, including Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and United States. These ambassadors were declared “persona non grata“ by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who then backtracked and insisted instead that the ambassadors should “be more careful in their statements.”
Osman Kavala has remained in Silivri Prison since November 2017. He has been arrested three times and acquitted twice of the same “crime.” He remains in prison despite the two binding judgements from the European Court. He is allowed prison visits from lawyers and twice a month from his wife. He is allowed just four hours a day out of his cell to walk the small prison yard.
In prison he is said to be his own book club, sharing his many books with other inmates. He and his wife are said to read the same books together so that they can discuss the books on her visits, according to a friend.
Founding chair of Anadolu Kültür, an Istanbul-based nonprofit arts and culture organization, Kavala has also established publishing companies in Turkey, including the publishing house İletişim Yayınları, Ana Publishing which published AnaBritannica (the Turkish version of Encyclopædia Britannica), Britannica Compton’s, and Temel Britannica, and he has been a board member at Aras Publishing. He has also contributed to numerous civil society organizations in Turkey, including the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, Center for Democracy and Reconciliation in Southeast Europe, the Turkish Foundation of Cinema and Audio-visual Culture, the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, Truth Justice Memory Center and history Foundation of Turkey.
He has received awards including the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize. His case has set Turkey in conflict with the European Courts and many countries in the West.
“I’m pleased—though not surprised—that Kavala is standing tall in prison. He deserves the international accolades he is receiving, but above all he deserves his freedom,” insists Hugh Williamson, Director of Human Rights Watch’s Europe and Central Asia Division.
To Take Action for Osman Kavala :
Send Appeals to:
Ministry of Justice
Minister of Justice Mr. Yılmaz Tunç,
06659 Ankara
Republic of Turkey
Please send appeals to the Embassy of Turkey in your own country.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah from Egypt was released from prison in September after five years. For more details on his case see June 2025 Substack profile. Freedom of expression organizations, including PEN, worked for his release. Pictured here with his mother and sister.
An attack on a writer, the shutting down of a publishing house, the torching of a newspaper reduce the space in the world where ideas can flow. Freedom of expression is vital to writers and to readers but is challenged daily around the world. Listed here are organizations whose work on human rights and in particular issues of freedom of expression I’ve been engaged with directly and indirectly over the years. Some of the organizations have broader agendas, but all have contributed to keeping space open for the individual voice.
PEN International (with its 147 centers in over 100 countries)
PEN American Center
English PEN
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Human Rights Watch
Amnesty International
Amnesty International USA
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Article 19
Index on Censorship
Poets and Writers
Authors Guild
International Center for Journalists
I’ve been reading and listening to old Graham Greene novels. I’ve admired Greene’s fiction for decades, his ability to take complex international political situations and settings and weave a consummate story that brings to life individual characters and the collective community—The Comedians, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and on and on. But I had never read his earlier mysteries, also set in a political world but following more closely the mystery/detective genre.
The Third Man, written in 1948 as a treatment for the 1949 award-winning Carol Reed film starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton, was published in 1950 as a novella. Even earlier Greene’s 1939 thriller The Confidential Agent, which became a film in 1945, was written in six-weeks as a “quick entertainment to support his family.” All stand on their own as early footprints of Graham Greene’s great literary work to come.
Set in post-war Vienna, The Third Man opens with the funeral of Harry Lime who may or may not be dead. His friend, a second-rate American novelist Rollo Martins, has come to work with him but grows suspicious about the circumstances surrounding Lime’s death and the reports of a third man at the scene.
As Martin investigates, he encounters those who knew Lime and his dubious activities, including Lime’s girlfriend to whom Martins finds himself attracted. Crime, betrayal and murder through the four Allied powers’ sectors of Vienna play out in this early noir novella.
From The Third Man:
ONE NEVER KNOWS when the blow may fall. When I saw Rollo Martins first I made this note on him for my security police files: ‘In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he’d rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worshipped Lime.’ I wrote there that phrase ‘in normal circumstances’ because I met him first at Harry Lime’s funeral. It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. It was as if even nature were doing its best to reject Lime, but we got him in at last and laid the earth back on him like bricks. He was vaulted in, and Rollo Martins walked quickly away as though his long gangly legs wanted to break into a run, and the tears of a boy ran down his thirty-five-year-old face. Rollo Martins believed in friendship, and that was why what happened later was a worse shock to him than it would have been to you or me (you because you would have put it down to an illusion and me because at once a rational explanation – however wrongly – would have come to my mind). If only he had come to tell me then, what a lot of trouble would have been saved.
If you are to understand this strange, rather sad story you must have an impression at least of the background – the smashed dreary city of Vienna divided up in zones among the Four Powers; the Russian, the British, the American, the French zones, regions marked only by notice boards, and in the centre of the city, surrounded by the Ring with its heavy public buildings and its prancing statuary, the Innere Stadt under the control of all Four Powers. In this once fashionable Inner City each Power in turn, for a month at a time, takes, as we call it, ‘the chair’, and becomes responsible for security; at night, if you were fool enough to waste your Austrian schillings on a night club, you would be fairly certain to see the International Power at work – four military police, one from each Power, communicating with each other, if they communicated at all, in the common language of their enemy. I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice.
The main characters in The Confidential Agent are identified only by letters. There is D, the protagonist, and K and L, antagonists, and a political conflict that is not named and an activity that only comes to light near the end. At first I felt I was reading an early Kafka novel, but eventually the story of the secret agent sent to London to buy coal for his war-torn country and prevent British mine owners from selling to the fascists in the Spanish Civil War becomes clear as rival agents also pursue the coal contracts and seek to sabotage D. The dangers and threats and romance that accompany D take the reader through pre-World War 2 London in a fast-paced thriller.
From The Confidential Agent:
The gulls swept over Dover. They sailed out like flakes of the fog, and tacked back towards the hidden town, while the siren mourned with them: other ships replied, a whole wake lifted up their voices – for whose death? The ship moved at half speed through the bitter autumn evening. It reminded D. of a hearse, rolling slowly and discreetly towards the ‘garden of peace’, the driver careful not to shake the coffin, as if the body minded a jolt or two. Hysterical women shrieked among the shrouds.”
“The third-class bar was jammed; a rugger team was returning home and they scrummed boisterously for their glasses, wearing striped ties. D. couldn’t always understand what they were shouting: perhaps it was slang – or dialect. It would take a little time for his memory of English completely to return; he had known it very well once, but now his memories were rather literary. He tried to stand apart, a middle-aged man with a heavy moustache and a scarred chin and worry like a habit on his forehead, but you couldn’t go far in that bar – an elbow caught him in the ribs and a mouth breathed bottled beer into his face. He was filled with a sense of amazement at these people; you could never have told from their smoky good fellowship that there was a war on – not merely a war in the country from which he had come, but a war here, half a mile outside Dover breakwater. He carried the war with him. Wherever D. was, there was the war. He could never understand that people were unaware of it.
Sharing here an image and passage of text from Burning Distance:
“Does our friendship mean nothing to you?” he says. “Can you get away for coffee this afternoon? You know the café near Covent Garden?”
I grow quiet. That is Adil’s and my restaurant. “Of course.” I start to ask if anyone will be with him, but I decide I don’t want to know. It’s one thing to go out and meet an old friend for coffee. It will be quite another to meet Adil.
Over the years I’ve accumulated a running list of words I haven’t known from two main sources: WordDaily and WordGenius.
Tonsure
/ˈtän(t)SHər/
Part of Speech: noun, verb
a part of a monk’s or priest’s head left bare on top by shaving off the hair.
an act of shaving the top of a monk’s or priest’s head as a preparation for entering a religious order.
verb
shave the hair on top of (a monk’s or priest’s head)
give a tonsure to
Examples:
“His hair is thinning up there—soon he’ll have a tonsure like a monk’s.”
“The speaker was a stout middle-aged young man with a natural tonsure and one of the thickest pairs of horn-rimmed glasses that Martins had ever seen.” (From Graham Greene’s The Third Man)
Suspire
/səˈspī(ə)r/
Part of speech: verb
To sigh; utter with long, sighing breaths
Example:
We’re pretty sure nobody has this date marked on their calendar as one to remember from the last decade. But, May 22, 2010 was the day Nicolaus Copernicus—the 16th century Polish astronomer who proposed the heliocentric theory of our planetary system, which the Catholic Church came to condemn—was reburied as a hero. Ah, sweet vindication. We imagine Copernicus somewhere in the great beyond suspiring with an eye-roll … “Finally.”
I’ve spoken at bookstores, university classes, book luncheons and in-person and zoom book clubs and look forward to more ahead. I enjoy giving readings and addressing audiences in many venues and moderating discussions on a wide range of topics and most of all meeting readers.
Click here for a list of future and past public events.
Or fill out the speaking request form to schedule an event.
I like engaging with readers so if you are in a Reading Group or Book Club and read one of my books, I’m glad to be in touch by email, zoom, or when possible in person. I can also suggest discussion topics.
Fill out the reading group form here to schedule a meeting.
Dear Joanne,
This puts it into perspective: Lasting from April 1992 to February 1996, the Siege of Sarajevo was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and the longest siege of a capital city in modern history. What times! Thanks for this reminder. J.