Bøger af Carolyn Taylor-Watts

Helena: an Odyssey is an absorbing saga of myth and obsession, of a family haunted by their illustrious Byzantine past and a compulsion to redeem it. Bittersweet love stories are set against wars, forced population exchanges and confusion about ethnic identity. Woven throughout lies the power and symbolism of hair. Helena's daughter Georgia, narrating the tale, begins in 1908 when her great grandparent the Greek Yiannis Kouvalis and two sons set out on an epic journey from a poor Turkish village to glittering Smyrna on the Aegean Coast. Eventually succeeding as prosperous merchants, the sons marry and have children. But the Young Turks are rising, and the ensuing Greco-Turkish wars culminate in the fiery destruction of Smyrna. Ethnic cleansing follows. Surviving remnants of the Kouvalis family are reduced once more to poverty and forced into what, to them, is an alien Greece. The burden of redemption passes down the generations to fall, finally, on the unlikely Helena who longs only to create beautiful hair and through it, achieve international fame. But she is distracted by her intense love for local boy Stephan. Thwarted in her attempts to follow him when he leaves for the coal mines of Australia, she travels instead to her sister in Toronto. It is here where her real heartaches begin.

In his youth in Toronto, only child Julian Whitely had to compete with three dead siblings for his mother's attention. On bad days back then, he often saw the ghosts of those infants slide along his bedroom walls, causing him to doubt his sanity as well as his mother's state of mind. Many years later during his thirtieth wedding anniversary in Vancouver, Julian chances on the snapshot of a teenage love. Recalling his cruelty to the girl, he's propelled on a mission of atonement fuelled by a desire and need to resolve a long-ago infatuation that now, alarmingly, is jeopardizing his marriage, his job, even his very life. Horrified yet ecstatic, Julian discovers he's not who he thinks he is, nor is anything what it seems.