My last lament

Aliki is one of the last of her kind, a lamenter who mourns and celebrates the passing of life. She is a part of an evolving Greece, a country moving steadily away from its rural traditions. To capture the fading folk art of lamenting, an American researcher asks Aliki to record her laments, but in...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Brown, James William, 1942- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Berkley Books, 2017.
Edition:First edition.
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Summary:Aliki is one of the last of her kind, a lamenter who mourns and celebrates the passing of life. She is a part of an evolving Greece, a country moving steadily away from its rural traditions. To capture the fading folk art of lamenting, an American researcher asks Aliki to record her laments, but in response, Aliki sings her own story. It begins in a village in northeast Greece, where Aliki witnesses the occupying Nazi soldiers execute her father for stealing a squash. Taken in by her friend Takis's mother, Aliki is joined by a Jewish refugee and her son, Stelios. When the village is torched and its people massacred, Aliki, Takis and Stelios are able to excape just as the war is ending. Fleeing across the chaotic landscape of a postwar Greece, the three become a makeshift family. They're bound by friendship and grief, but torn apart by betrayal, madness and heartbreak. Through Aliki's powerful voice, an unforgettable one that blends light and dark with wry humor, this book delivers a fitting eulogy to a way of life and provides a vivid portrait of a timeless Greek woman whose story of love and loss is eternal.--from dust jacket.
Physical Description:341 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references (pages 337-339).
ISBN:9780399583407
0399583408
9780399583414
0399583416
Author Notes:James William Brown , author of the critically acclaimed Blood Dance , is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford and has also been a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The recipient of two fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, he has also directed the editorial departments of textbook publishers in New York, Boston, and Athens, Greece. Previously he lived and taught in Greece for ten years.