A 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 Zé 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, Zé's son, Petros, has become a world-class musician bridging Cuban and Greek traditions, while Zé ha