This interconnected historical novel presents twelve portraits of women, one common characteristic of whom is their close or occasional relationship with my grandmother.
These are real individuals who lived through roughly the same period, and therefore their lives are often intertwined—usually unwittingly—with the historical events that marked the 20th century: the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922 and the difficult lives of refugees in Greece, Metaxas' dictatorship, World War II and the German Occupation, the bleak years of the Civil War, the seven-year rule of the Junta, the events of the Polytechnic uprising, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989…
Through their occasionally humorous and sometimes dramatic stories told by the narrator, the reader observes how these ordinary women experienced the above historical moments. However, fiction often intervenes as well, filling in the gaps of direct or indirect knowledge of the events and adding delicacy to the presentation of people and situations.
