It’s a fool’s game to believe one can simultaneously achieve both love and fame, some say. Helena believes she can achieve just this, but it’s a long, hard road for her. She grows up to the cries of bereaved refugee women in what, at the time, is a poor part of Greece. To tension in her parent’s calamitous marriage. To the local people, she and her family are spurned because they are not real Greeks. While on a quest for both love and fame, she remains obsessed with a lover s

In thrall to the fate of my characters. Sunday night on a long weekend and I'm in my small, dark room upstairs writing - well, editing to be precise. Now it is 10 PM. and still I'm at it. This must be my zillionth edit and I think I'll never be finished with it. What kind of a life is this? How does one finish a novel, or should the question be: can a writer ever get to the end? Can a writer ever be satisfied with what they've written, and especially with the ending? The answ

Where did my character Spiros come from? Next to Helena, it is he, her great uncle, who burns many of the pages with his sufferings and brief triumphs. An accidental character, I call him, since I created him only because I felt that first-son Adam needed a brother. Somehow he becomes Cain to his brother Abel. Yearning for his father’s acceptance, he works his body to dust. He racks his soul. At his shoulder stands his fair-looking gentle brother Adam who is both his parents’