A CERTAIN QUALITY OF LIGHT

A haunting and heartbreak novel by Dorina Papaliou, a Greek writer now living in Oxford England with her husband, the international best-selling novelist, Apostolos Doxiadis.

Intricately plotted, A Certain Quality of Light follows the efforts of a contemporary young Greek woman, Nefeli, to find a painting lost in the chaotic and brutal aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War II.

In vivid and utterly compelling flashbacks, we meet Nefeli's grandmother, Louise, half Scottish, half Greek, an artist and volunteer nurse who falls under the spell of a resistance fighter on her hospital ward. Together they risk their lives to fight Greece's Axis foes. Louise's work on behalf of her country, and her heart, ultimately clash with her loveless marriage, with tragic results. You can't help but be caught up in granddaughter Nefeli's efforts to learn why the painting, offered in ransom to her grandmother's captors, was lost as her grandmother was executed. And as the novel draws to its surprising conclusions, you'll come to understand how objects and family myths together shape our understandings of our selves and our heritages.

This is a story of the power of love, the tragedy of circumstance, the pull of memory, and our search for our ancestors. At the same time, it sheds some light on the tragic little country of Greek that has been so battered by forces beyond its control for decades if not centuries.

A Certain Quality of Light was published to critical acclaim in Greece by Ikaros in 2013. Dorina who graduated from Brown and has a degree from Cambridge is fluent in English and eager to travel to support her work. Her first novel, Gutter, featuring a teenage cartoonist who solves a mystery, was published in Greece in 2008. She's now working on a novel set in the 1970s during the Greek military dictatorship which hinges on the clash of public and private lives with themes of love, loss, resistance, symbolic acts of violence, and...the power of music.