Summer on the Cold War Planet
By Paula Classon Buck
Genre: Literary Fiction
Release: September 3, 2015
Publisher: Fomite
“Each story he told shed about as much light as a match and
made all the dark around it worth wanting to know...”
In the late spring of 1989, Lyddie, a young American art
historian, finds herself alone and pregnant when her husband, Phelps,
disappears in Kurdish Iraq. Set adrift from the security of their marriage, she
returns to the divided city of Berlin where they met four years before, seeking
truths she believes Phelps may have kept from her.
Now the ferment at Germany’s borders is spilling into the
private lives of their bohemian friends—particularly that of exiled East German
painter Axel Herzog. Lyddie has always felt the gravitational pull of Axel’s
art and of the stories of mystics he learned as a boy in Greece. And though
Phelps once warned her away from Axel, the attraction grows stronger as she
uncovers a vulnerability beneath the scorn he learned on the other side of the
Wall.
When revelations about Axel’s past force her to retreat to
an island in Greece, Lyddie finds she has run headlong into everything she has
tried to avoid.
In this novel of conflicting allegiances played out between
a richly realized late Cold War Berlin and the stark beauty of the Cycladic
islands, travellers, natives, and refugees circle one another warily, their
fates hanging on the question of which trusts if any, will remain unviolated.
Author Bio
Paula Closson Buck is the author of two books of poems. Her
short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Review, Kenyon
Review, and Ploughshares. She has lived briefly in both Berlin and the Greek
islands, but her current home is in Lewisburg, PA, where she teaches creative
writing at Bucknell University.
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