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Nicolai’s Daughters

The Sarinopoulous family has survived a tragedy that history has forgotten. The family is marked by war, fear and shame that cannot be erased by the idle gossip used to pass the time in the small village of Diakofto on the edge of the Peloponnese.

Alexia, a young Canadian lawyer compelled to fulfill her father’s dying wish to find the half-sister he kept from her, arrives in Diakofto to discover an extended family, a culture she knows nothing about, and a country in financial crisis. Looming over her visit and the one trip back to Greece her father had taken twenty-five years earlier is the tragedy of Kalavryta, a Second World War massacre that changed the Sarinopoulous family forever.

Told in alternating voices of Alexia and Nicolai, each returning to Greece to mourn a loss and find solace, Nicolai’s Daughters uncovers the secrets and the shame that fester in a family, refusing to heal until the truth is revealed.

AUTHOR

Stella Leventoyannis Harvey

Stella Leventoyannis Harvey is a fiction writer whose short stories have been short listed in contests such as the Writers Union short fiction contest. Her stories have appeared in The Literary Leanings Anthology, The New Orphic Review, Emerge Magazine, The Question and The Dalhousie Review. Her non-fiction has appeared in Pique Newsmagazine and the Globe and Mail. She has completed drafts of two novels and a collection of short fiction. A social worker by training, she ran a management consulting practice in Canada and abroad. She was born in Cairo, Egypt and moved to Calgary, Alberta as a child with her family. Much of her family still lives in Greece, where she visits often, indulging her love of Greek food and culture and honing her fluency in the language.

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Excerpts & Samples ×
Behind the fenced grounds of the museum, stood a life-size sculpture. A scene. Alexia moved closer, knotted her fingers through the mesh. The sculpture had turned green under the sun, rain and all the other things that hit it. Still, the four stone figures seemed so real. A dead man in a suit lay on a blanket; his eyes open to the sky. A woman tugged at the blanket where his body lay. A young boy no more than six or seven pulled at her sleeve as if to persuade her to let go, leave the dead man behind. Another figure stood apart from the rest. A girl, younger, her arms helplessly by her sides. Alexia searched the girl’s vacant gaze and tightened her grip on the fence. Images flashed. Lights. A chill. Something cold in her hand. The girl must be the same age she was when. She couldn’t think of this right now. Not now. “Things happen to us,” Christina said softly, and put her arm on Alexia’s back. “One day everything okay. The next all is wrong.”

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Details

Dimensions:

336 Pages
8in * 5.25in * 1in
500gr

Published:

October 01, 2012

Publisher:

Signature Editions

ISBN:

9781897109977

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Literary

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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