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From Dougie McHale, author of The Hellenic Collection, comes a sweeping new standalone novel that brings the Greek Civil War, one of Europe’s most devastating and least-told conflicts vividly to life through the eyes of the women it scarred forever.
When Eva’s final IVF attempt fails, her marriage begins to fracture under the weight of grief and exhaustion. Then a call from Athens pulls her back to Greece: her grandmother Helena is dying and has left behind a final, cryptic instruction. The tapes. Skiathos.
What Eva uncovers is a family history shaped by the violence and silences of post-war Greece. Through Helena’s recorded testimony, the novel plunges readers into Athens in 1944, where liberation from Nazi occupation gives way almost immediately to civil war. As British forces intervene and the country fractures along ideological lines, Helena, from a politically divided middle-class family falls in love with Dimitrios, a left-wing journalist marked as an enemy of the state.
Caught between love and survival, Helena is forced into an impossible choice when British intelligence threatens her family. Betrayal, imprisonment, and exile follow. In the brutal Averoff women’s prison and the prison islands beyond, Helena gives birth to a child who is taken from her by the state, one of thousands of children displaced by the civil war and its aftermath. When she is finally released, Greece has rebuilt itself through selective forgetting, and Helena is left carrying a grief that must remain unspoken for decades.
In the present, as Eva absorbs the weight of this inheritance, her own life reaches a turning point, including an unexpected pregnancy that arrives at the very moment her marriage may be ending. Faced with the same questions that defined her grandmother’s life, Eva must decide whether to repeat a legacy shaped by fear and silence, or finally confront the truths history tried to erase.
Meticulously researched and deeply moving, this is historical women’s fiction that restores the Greek Civil War to the heart of European history, revealing its intimate, generational cost.
In a past life, Dougie McHale has been a dockyard worker, student, and musician. Writing has always been in his blood and bone. He draws inspiration from his love of Edinburgh and Greece. Their people and histories have all found their way into the books he writes. Dougie is the author of several novels of both Contemporary Women's Fiction and Second World War Fiction. His novels are rich with characters that face impossible choices, extraordinary circumstances and the power of secrets told through ordinary people reacting to the ups and downs of the human condition and the complexity of the heart. Dougie lives with his wife, daughter and forever hungry golden retriever in an intermittent empty nest as his son comes and goes.
Discover the books that readers are describing as an emotional roller-coaster of intrigue and drama, love and hope. If you'd like to connect, then visit Dougie at his website, join his newsletter and get a free novella, as well as the occasional update about new releases, updates and book promotions. www.dougiemchale.com. Be part of his Facebook page at facebook.com/www.dougiemchale