As an old woman and the last of the village lamenters—women who compose lament-poems
for grieving families—Aliki
agrees to talk to an American ethnographer about her fading art. In the
process, Aliki begins to sing her own story: before she was one of the
last of her kind, Aliki was a fourteen-year-old girl whose isolated village was under Nazi control during World
War II.
Stricken
mute after the trauma of witnessing her father’s public execution,
Aliki is taken in by a neighbor and her
troubled son, Takis. The family is also harboring a Jewish refugee,
Stelios, and his mother, who teach them the ancient art of shadow
puppetry in which shadows on the screen tell the classic Greek fables.
As
the war nears its end, the Nazis torch the village and massacre its
people, but Aliki, Takis, and Stelios escape.
Fleeing across the chaotic landscape of post-war Greece, the three
become a makeshift family, traveling as a troupe of shadow puppeteers to
earn a living. As they make their way through Greece, they are
witnesses to a country being pulled apart by the departing
Axis occupants and various nationalist rebels.
MY LAST LAMENT combines
the larger-than-life themes of classical Greek literature—madness,
grief, political intrigue—with an intimate tale of friendship and loved
forged in the crucible of wartime. It is also a story that traces
Greece’s ongoing economic and political turmoil to
its post-war beginnings, shining a light on one of the lesser known
legacies of World War II.
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Berkley (April 4, 2017)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0399583408