Greek Love: A Novel of Cuba

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 Ze 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, 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. 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 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 hope-and a woman's tenacious love.