A Greek Love: A Novel of Cuba

By Zoé Valdés

Book Overview

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 Z? 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, Z?'s son, Petros, has become a world-class musician bridging Cuban and Greek traditions, while Z? has become a scholar herself. When a recording executive invites Petros to give concerts in Greece, Z? 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 Z?'s one great, lost love.

With echoes of the breakout novel that made Zo? Vald?s an international literary star, A Greek Love is a tale of passion, endurance, and hope--and a woman's tenacious love.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1956763406
• ISBN13: 9781956763409
• Release Date: May 2023
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.3"