Eleni

"Nicholas Gage's mother, Eleni (i. e., Helen) Gatzoyiannis, was tortured and executed by Communist guerrillas during the Greek Civil War. She had sent the nine-year-old Nicholas and three of his four sisters (the fourth later escaped too) to safety, hoping to join them later; for this she was branded a 'fascist.' Haunted by his mother's fate, Gage eventually left his job as a New York Times reporter and, while tracking down his mother's murderers with the intention of killing them, pieced together the story of Eleni's life and found the meaning of his own. This is a magnificent book which almost incidentally embodies the best history yet of the Greek Civil War." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

"The last days of Eleni are almost unbearably poignant in her son's superbly dramatic narrative....He knew his mother's innermost thoughts because he was her son. It is impossible to doubt a word of his terrible story....Between chapters Gage inserts three or four paragraphs summarizing the contemporaneous progress of the war on its larger stage. Within each chapter he occasionally interpolates his own reminiscences of events which, as a small boy, he experienced with great intensity but scarcely comprehended. The separate strands lead to an intensely moving climax, making Eleni one of the rare books in which the power of art re-creates the full historical truth." C. M. Woodhouse, The New York Review of Books

"Gage was a reporter for the New York Times for a decade before quitting his job to tell his mother's story. He interviewed scores of people — villagers, soldiers, government officials — and read voluminous reports and other documents. In the beginning, he wanted to avenge Eleni's death. But writing the book and seeing how his mother refused to hate even her enemies showed him that revenge would never break the cycle of killing. Gage's account of her life is more than the story of one person. It tells in a powerful way how a mother's love can reach far beyond the limitations of time, space, and even death to save and protect her young." Rosalie E. Dunbar, The Christian Science Monitor

"{Gage's} book, part thriller, part history, part romantic epic, is a remarkable feat of technique, and of soul. Gage deftly shifts among hundreds of characters, dozens of locales, and a welter of big-scale narratives...that in lesser hands would overwhelm the story of one woman's family. He manages to be fair to people he has every reason to despise: he evokes the grievances of the guerrillas as fully as their treachery, the gullibility of the villagers as well as their jealousy and spite. Painfully, he recalls the mother whom he revered with the absolute awe and devotion of a child. Yet as he tells the story of her utter heroism, he views her with a journalist's balance and detachment....He is equally candid about the catastrophic effects of his grandfather's hardheartedness, his uncle's greed, his father's preference for being a family man in Greece but a bachelor in America." William A. Henry, Time