Irena Karafilly Libros

"It is early autumn, 1997 and Kate Thuringer is back in her hometown to help her college-age daughter settle into her new life. A professional photographer, Kate has not visited Montreal for almost a decade; has avoided one particular street for some twenty-seven years. Most of those years, she has lived quietly with her cardiologist husband and two children in western Canada. Before her marriage, however, Kate survived a turbulent year in which Quaebaecois terrorists kidnapped a British diplomat and murdered an innocent politician. The middle-aged Kate is obsessed with the past, particularly with the memory of a poor francophone music student with whom she, a privileged anglophone, had been involved during the historic October Crisis. Though totally apolitical, the young Kate had unexpectedly found herself the victim of a social and political drama whose permutations would change the course of her entire life. Back in Montreal almost three decades later, she is plunged into a mid-life crisis, struggling to reconcile her youthful dreams with her stale marriage, her empty nest, her quickly approaching fiftieth birthday. The House on Selkirk Avenue is a lyrical, evocative novel about obsessive love, family bonds, aging, and the impact of political events on innocent people's lives."--

'A very accomplished novel' Louis de Bernieres, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin 'Hard to put this book down' Sofka Zinovieff Calliope Adham - young, strong-willed, and recently widowed - is schoolmistress in the village of Molyvos when Hitler's army invades Greece in 1941. Well-read and linguistically gifted, she is recruited by the Germans to act as their liaison officer. It is the beginning of a personal and national saga that will last for several decades. Calliope's wartime duties bring her into close contact with Lieutenant Lorenz Umbreit, the Wehrmacht commander. The schoolmistress is an active member of the Greek Resistance, yet her friendship with the German blossoms against all odds, in a fishing village seething with dread and suspicion. Amid privation and death, the villagers' hostility finally erupts, but the bond between Calliope and Umbreit survives, taking unforeseeable turns as Greece is ravaged by civil war and oppressed by military dictatorship. It is against this turbulent background that Calliope emerges as a champion for girls' and women's rights. Arrested Song is a haunting, sumptuous novel, weaving the private and the historic into a vivid tapestry of Greek island life. Spanning over three decades, it chronicles the story of an extraordinary woman and her lifelong struggle against social and political tyranny.