The House in Smyrna

✍ Scribed by Levy, Tatiana Salem

• Book ID: 108719574
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 86 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781925106411

✦ Synopsis

From one of Granta 's Best Young Brazilian Novelists comes a startling and powerful story about returning to one's origins in order to move forward.

In Rio de Janeiro, a woman suffering from a mysterious illness, which is eroding her body and mind, decides to accept a challenge from her grandfather: to take the key to the house where he grew up--in the Turkish city of Smyrna--and open the door.

As she embarks on this pilgrimage, she begins to write of her progress. The writing soon becomes an exploration of her family's legacy of displacement in Europe, told in several narrative strands. Sifting through family stories--her grandfather's migration from Turkey to Brazil, her parents' exile in Portugal under the Brazilian military dictatorship, her mother's death, and her own love affair with a violent man--she traces her family's history in a journey to make sense of the past and to understand her place in it.