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Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
July 2011
On Sale: July 5, 2011
304 pages ISBN: 0802170862 EAN: 9780802170866 Paperback
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Fiction
Sweeping from post–WWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan
Budapest of 1990, Christina Shea’s Smuggled is the story of
Eva Farkas, who loses her identity, quite literally, as a
young child, when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the
Hungarian border to escape the Nazis. When five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania
at the end of the war, she arrives in the fictional border
town of Crisu, a pocket of relative safety, where she is
given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle, and
instructed never to speak another word of Hungarian again.
“Eva is dead,” she is told. As the years pass, Anca proves
an unquenchable spirit, full of passion and imagination,
with a lust for life even when a backdrop of communist
oppression threatens to derail her at every turn. Time is
layered in this quest for self, culminating in the end of
the Iron Curtain and Anca’s reclaiming of the name her
mother gave her. When she returns to Hungary in 1990, the
country is changing as fast as the price of bread, and Eva
meets Martin, an American teacher who rents the apartment
opposite hers and cultivates a flock of pigeons on his
balcony. As Eva and Martin’s cross-cultural relationship
deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs
from his abusive mother, Eva’s lifelong search for family
and identity comes full circle.
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