The Village by Philip Duke @freshly_press @lovebooksgroup #lovebookstours
A Cretan village confronts the Nazi juggernaut sweeping across Europe. A village matriarch tries to hold her family together...Her grieving son finds a new life in the Cretan Resistance…A naive English soldier unwillingly finds the warrior in himself…And a fanatical German paratrooper is forced to question everything he thought he believed in. The lives of four ordinary people are irrevocably entwined and their destinies changed forever as each of them confronts the horrors of war and its echoes down the decades.
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Excerpt
Streams of water
cascaded off the houses into the alleys and coursed down the streets, cutting
deep gullies in their hungry search for the sea, as though the village itself
was dying from a thousand slashes. Harsh winds continued to hurl in from the
mountains, roaring down the valleys and gullies, and blowing away everything
that was not tied down. Sheet lightning flashed over the sea, now barely
distinguishable from the pall of clouds embrowning everything. Thunder rocked
the very foundations of the house. A violent gust of wind coughed down the
chimney and the smoke from the fire petulantly kicked back into the living room
for a moment but then, as though remembering where it needed to be, continued
on its course up the chimney.
Anastasia turned to
the sound of footsteps followed by a slither as someone slipped in the mud
outside. The heavy wooden door was thrown open and her husband, Antoni, stormed
inside, water falling in large globules from his clothes.
He was followed by the
source of the slithering, Yianni, his clothing covered in thick mud. Anastasia
stifled a laugh. ‘Take this, Husband, and you, too, Yianni,’ she ordered, and
threw two rough cloths at them. The men stripped down in front of the fire, the
steam rising from their bodies and the rain dripping onto the hard earthen
floor to create little craters of mud. Anastasia averted her gaze as they
pulled off their trousers; she had never seen a man naked, not even her
husband, and she did not intend to start now. Retrieving dry clothes from the other
end of the house, Anastasia handed them over and at last they grunted that she
could face back to them.
Author Bio
Philip Duke is a retired professor of anthropology. He and his wife lived on the island of Crete, Greece for five years before returning to the United States in 2015. His first novel, A Terrible Unrest, is currently being turned into a screenplay. Philip now lives in Durango, Colorado, USA.
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