North of Ithaka
A Journey Home Through a Family's Extraordinary Past
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Leaving behind a sparkling social life and a successful journalism career, Eleni Gage moved from New York City to the remote Greek village of Lia. Lia is the same village where her father was born and her grandmother murdered, and which her father, Nicholas Gage, made famous twenty years ago with his international bestseller Eleni.
Her four aunts (the diminutive but formidable thitsas) warned Eleni that she'd get killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves if she moved to Lia, invoking the curse her grandmother placed on any of her descendants who returned to Greece. But Eleni was determined to rebuild the ruins of her grandparents' house and to come to terms with her family's tragic history. Along the way, she learned to dodge bad omens and to battle the scorpions on her pillow and the shadows in her heart. She also came to understand that Greece and its memories were not only dark and death-filled, and that memories of the dead can bring new life to the present.
Part travel memoir and part family saga, North of Ithaka is, above all, a journey home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Gage decided to take a break from her magazine career in Manhattan to rebuild her ancestral home in a Greek village in 2002, her father's four sisters, who'd by then emigrated to Massachusetts, were not amused. They predicted she'd be killed by Albanians and eaten by wolves. Even worse, they feared she would invite the curse of their mother Gage's namesake who, in 1948, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and executed by a firing squad for plotting her family's escape to the U.S. during the Greek civil war (Gage's father, Nicholas, chronicled these events in his 1983 bestseller, Eleni). In rebuilding her grandmother's ruined home, Gage hoped to reverse some of the devastation her grandmother's murder caused. Those familiar with Under the Tuscan Sun type expat tales won't be surprised when Gage becomes mired in massive amounts of bureaucratic red tape, but manages to fulfill her dream with the help of kind villagers. Her recounting of this odyssey is occasionally maudlin, but the scope of her rebuilding effort is Herculean enough to keep readers turning pages to see the finished product for themselves. Reconstruction of the original Gatzoyiannis home is overshadowed by the story's real meat: the building of a bridge between an American and her tough-as-nails roots. Photos.
