A 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 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 Valds an international literary star, A Greek Love is a tale of passion, endurance, and hope - and a woman's tenacious love.

'This spare, beautifully written novel encompasses the whole world and the enduring geography of love in all of its expressions. Zo Valds has given us a heroine whose fierce and loyallove of her family and families is inspiring and unforgettable. This novel is a journey and a mournful, joyous song.' - Marita Golden, author of The Wide Circumference of Love

'[A Greek Love is] a deceptively simple book, like all things Cuban. Zo Valds is so good at shining a light on the pages that are not there by showing us the ones that are. Her Cuban characters are brave, but they are also, realistically, a product of a totalitarian regime where silence is survival. All of that is present in this short page-turner. As is, of course, in true Valds fashion: love.' - Vanessa Garcia, author of White Light

'Unforgettable.' - Daniel Fernndez, Nuevo Heraldo

'This novel lifts a song of hope.' - Le Soir