IT’S NOT A CHRONICLE OF THOSE YEARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST.

He was unable to enter Varosha during a visit to Cyprus six years ago, but was escorted across the border into the country’s Turkish side thanks to a Turkish Cypriot politician who served as his guide. Obtaining similar treatment on the Greek side, Heighton, acknowledges that “Nobody was talking then about reconciliation and reunification. But they are talking about it quite seriously now.”

In the relative calm of Heighton’s Varosha, Elias struggles with the psychic wounds of deployment. “He senses the playback might go on every night for years — an unfaceable future,” Heighton writes. “Maybe it’s looping in the back of his mind twenty-four hours a day, waiting from him to re-enter the cinema of sleep.”

To vividly convey Elias’s experience in Afghanistan, Heighton consulted several members of the military but allows that dates were modified “for reasons that have to do with the economic debacle in Cyprus, and the timing of the novel. I just plead that it’s fiction,” he says. “It’s not a chronicle of those years in the Middle East.”

Though the protagonist of these pages is Elias, the character Heighton favours most is Erkan Kaya, the debonair Turkish colonel who is fully aware of both the dwellers in the restricted zone and Elias’s presence there. Concealing this information from the rest of the authorities, Kaya aims to sustain his leisurely lifestyle, especially when it risks being disrupted by a colleague’s insistence that Varosha be searched for the Canadian soldier.

External forces encroaching on self-sufficient territories are as much a signature of Heighton’s novels as the carefully considered words and observations that lend his lines their voltage. Since 2002, when he began Afterlands, a riff on the Polaris expedition, Heighton has reflected on ethnic nationalism and what he terms “issues of borders and belonging. They’ve come into the last three novels for sure,” he says. “Inevitably, I’m touching on those conflicts — sometimes in a mood of hopefulness, other times in a mood of hopelessness.”

Nightingale, he emphasizes, was constructed from obsessions, travels and memories. The latter, in particular, “self-corrupt in the same way that Varosha itself is slowly degrading and falling apart.” Ruins nevertheless can offer inspiration.

“It’s actually very useful to a fiction writer,” Heighton says. “Let your memories become overgrown with vines and creepers, and you end up with something that’s your own, that for better or worse, no one else will write.”