The Clover House: A Novel
A powerful story of family, betrayal, and forgiveness, The Clover House is set in Greece during WWII and at present-day Carnival. To escape her Greek heritage and the mother whose love she always sought, Calliope Notaris Brown Americanizes her name to Callie. But when her uncle, Nestor, dies, leaving the contents of his house to his favorite niece, Callie must return to Greece to sort through all that Nestor has hoarded and to face her estranged mother, Clio. Arriving as Carnival begins, Callie is swept up in the wild abandon and the attentions of a young man, further threatening a troubled relationship with her fiancé in Boston. Callie avoids her problems by digging through her uncle’s possessions, unearthing the story of a young Clio in the Italian-occupied Greece of the 1940s. As she pieces together her mother’s past, Callie discovers herself in the process and reveals a family secret that Nestor wanted her to find all along. In her first novel, Power melds the stories of mother and daughter into an absorbing tale that deserves to rank high on the list of women’s fiction. --Diane Holcomb