Eleni

(Paperback)

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Description

'Not only a son's poignant memorial to his dead mother but an important work of history' - Observer A son's quest to avenge his mother's murder. In 1948, in a Greek mountain village, Eleni Gatzoyiannis was arrested, tortured and shot. She was one of the 158,000 victims of the Greek Civil War. Her crime had been to help her children escape from the Communist guerrillas who occupied their village. Her son, Nicholas Gage, was then eight years old. Eleni is the story of his obsessive and harrowing reconstruction of his mother's life and death and his pursuit of his mother's killer.

Reviews

"A devoted and brilliant achievement. One of the rare books in which the power of art recreates the historical truth" New York Review of Books "Exciting and harrowing... An amazing achievement" -- Patrick Leigh Fermor "I cannot think of another book that so compellingly demonstrates the gradual deterioration of human values in the name of lofty goals. Minutely observed and eloquently rendered" New York Times

Author Bio

Nicholas Gage was born in Greece and emigrated to the United States ten years later. He was an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for the New York Times when he wrote Eleni, working as their bureau chief in Athens. It was published in 1983 and went on to win the Royal Society for Literature's Heinemann Award for the best book of the year in 1984. Eleni became a bestseller all over the world and was made into a feature film.