In the early twentieth century, a teenage Greek girl in Constantinople loses both her parents and, together with her younger sister, gets thrown into a massive population exchange between Greece and Turkey. She ends up in a refugee camp in northern Greece. With determination she creates a life in her new country, becoming a teacher in a small mountain town near Greeces northwestern borders with Albania and Yugoslavia. She meets and marries a young lawyer from a historic and tragic Macedonian family. Her story extends through a century of war and peace and is peppered with likable characters, horrific events, and a love story. Among the protagonists are two strong women, a charming and indomitable man, and a smart but sickly kid. Now and again her drive, perseverance, and common sense will save the day and reward her with happiness, which nevertheless will come and go like interludes of sunshine in otherwise endlessly stormy weather. The reader will also get candid and authentic glimpses on poorly known historical conflicts such as the Balkan Wars, the worlds greatest ethnic cleansing, the occupation loan that the Nazis exacted from Greece, the Greek Civil War, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and the dispute over the use of the name Macedonia.
Theodore Modis was born in Greece. At the age of eighteen he won a full scholarship to study in the United States. He received a Masters in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Physics, both from Columbia University, New York. He carried out research in particle-physics experiments at Brookhaven National Laboratory and afterward at CERN in Europe. Later he switched to industry and worked at Digital Equipment Corporation as the head of a Management Science consultants group. Ten years later he founded his own consulting company, Growth Dynamics, in Geneva. He is author/co-author to over one hundred articles in scientific and business journals and ten books translated into a number of languages. He has on occasion taught at Columbia University, the University of Geneva, the European business schools INSEAD and IMD, and the leadership school DUXX in Monterrey, Mexico. He lives in Lugano, Switzerland. For more info visit www.growth-dynamics.com
