For readers of Isabel Allende, Gabriela Garcia, and Julia Alvarez, the story of a woman who must fight for her love and her child in a Cuba suffocated by oppression A free spirit who spends time near the port of Havana, where her friend Osiris is known as the "Greek sailormen's whore," teenager Zé becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a captain's son her age. By the time she realizes her condition, the ship has left and the boy is gone. In her father's Cuba, an unwed teenage mother is a source of scandal and shame and a threat to his ambitions in the Party. He disowns her and brutally throws her out of her home. Led by her mother, she leaves the city for refuge in Matanzas, a university town rich in Afro-Cuban culture, where her mother's sister, a music scholar, lives and where she will raise her child mentored by these three older women--aunt, mother, and Osiris.
Years later, Zé's son, Petros, has become a world-class musician bridging Cuban and Greek traditions, while Zé has become a scholar herself. When a recording executive invites Petros to give concerts in Greece, Zé seeks permission from the authorities to leave the island and accompany him. Secretly--a secret they guard from the authorities and her father, now a Party stalwart--they both nourish the hope of somehow finding Petros's father and Zé's one great, lost love.
With echoes of the breakout novel that made Zoé Valdés an international literary star,
A Greek Love is a tale of passion, endurance, and hope--and a woman's tenacious love.
Author: Zoé Valdés
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 05/02/2023
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 8.35h x 5.67w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9781956763409
Review Citation(s): Booklist 04/01/2023 pg. 18
About the Author
Zoé Valdés was born in Cuba in 1959 and worked with UNESCO and the Cuban Cultural Office in Paris between 1983 and 1988. In exile in France since 1995, she has been a screenwriter and assistant director of the magazine Ciné Cubano. Her bestselling debut novel, Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada, brought her international acclaim--she was once dubbed "the Madonna of Cuban literature"--and she has written many more novels, including I Gave You All I Had and The Weeping Woman, both published by Arcade. Winner of the Planeta Prize, Azorín Prize, and Premio de Novela Ciudad de Torrevieja, she received the Tres Llaves (Three Keys) to the city of Miami in 2001. She lives in Paris.
David Frye teaches anthropology and Latin American culture and society at the University of Michigan. As a professional translator he has published more than thirty books in translation, ranging from
Heart of Tango (2010) by the Spanish novelist Elia Barceló and the sixteenth-century picaresque novel
Lazarillo de Tormes (2015) to the poetry of Nancy Morejón. He resides in Ann Arbor.
