Greek Love

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 sailormens whore,' teenager Ze becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a captains son her age. By the time she realizes her condition, the ship has left and the boy is gone. In her fathers 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 mothers sister, a music scholar, lives and where she will raise her child mentored by these three older womenaunt, mother, and Osiris. Years later, Ze's son, Petros, has become a world-class musician bridging Cuban and Greek traditions, while Ze has become a scholar herself. When a recording executive invites Petros to give concerts in Greece, Ze seeks permission from the authorities to leave the island and accompany him. Secretlya secret they guard from the authorities and her father, now a Party stalwartthey both nourish the hope of somehow finding Petros's father and Ze's one great, lost love. With echoes of the breakout novel that made Zoe Valdes an international literary star, A Greek Love is a tale of passion, endurance, and hopeand a womans tenacious love.