The Gold Letter

A cherished heirloom reveals the destinies of three generations of women in a powerful saga of lost love by the bestselling Greek author of The House by the River.

After years spent in Germany struggling to come to terms with a dispirited and abusive past, Fenia Karapanos has returned to her roots in Greece. Her estranged grandfather has bequeathed her his villa in Athens, a gesture she assumes is reparation for having disowned her late mother. After taking in a grateful Syrian refugee to help her restore the property—and her life—Fenia discovers a collection of love letters hidden under the floorboards, reaching back nearly a century. In each one, Fenia unfolds another piece of her broken family history.

But it’s Fenia’s solicitous cousin, Melpo, who offers more to the story than Fenia can imagine. Melpo shares everything she knows—about Fenia’s grandmother and mother, their elusive and heartbreaking searches for happiness, and two families linked across decades by betrayal, secrets, abandonment, and forbidden love. It upends everything Fenia believed was true about her family. But it could also draw her closer to finding self-fulfillment—and a place to call home.

Lena Manta was born in Istanbul, Turkey, to Greek parents. She moved to Greece at a very young age and now lives with her husband and two children on the outskirts of Athens. Although she studied to be a nursery school teacher, Lena instead directed her own puppet theater before writing articles for local newspapers and working as a director for a local radio station. Manta was proclaimed Author of the Year in both 2009 and 2011 by Greek Life & Style magazine. She has written thirteen books, including The Gold Letter, her second book to be translated into English, and the bestselling The House by the River, which has sold almost 250,000 copies. Hers is a voice to be reckoned with, and each new book is a tour de force in the Greek publishing world.

Gail Holst-Warhaft is a poet, translator, musician, literary scholar, and the poet laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012. Her books include the poetry collections Lucky Country and Penelope’s Confession as well as the nonfiction works The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, Road to Rembetika, and The Fall of Athens, a memoir in prose and poems. She has translated The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias and I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis. Her poems and translations from Greek, French, and Anglo-Saxon have been published in many journals and anthologies, including Literary Imagination, Per Contra, Translation, Southerly, Antipodes, and Stand. Holst-Warhaft lives in Ithaca, New York.