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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 postβWWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990, Christina Sheaβs 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. βEva is dead,β 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 Ancaβs 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 Martinβs cross-cultural relationship deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs from his abusive mother, Evaβs lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle.
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