Shades of Resistance

Set in 1973 Greece during the military dictatorship, Shades of Resistance follows thirty-year-old American Jonas Korda as he stumbles blindly into the islands of the Aegean.

Attempting to
physically escape from a life--a disillusioned engagement with 1960s
politics and an ill-fated sort-of-marriage--that he has long since
emotionally fled, Jonas is instead faced with the question of his
capacity for true human connections.

Unwittingly he becomes involved with two expatriate Greek musicians
who had self-exiled from their homeland six years before, when the
military junta took power, but are now returning to create oppositional
energy through the form they know best: traditional Greek poetry set to
the music of a composer who's been banned by the brutal and surreal
junta. Through the force of their commitment and sacrifice, Jonas is
reacquainted with the relation between the heart and the larger world.

Jonas is also confronted, sequentially, by two women who in very
different ways bring his emotional struggles into focus. One--a
Greek-Canadian searching for her father lost somewhere to the
depredations of the dictatorship--who seeks to draw him in. The other--an
alienated Belgian painter turning her back on a life of artistic and
gender frustrations--who holds him away.

The novel's lyrically evoked Greek islands are counterpoint to
political terror captured with both shuddering intensity and mordant
black humor. Shades of Resistance is that rare work of fiction
that explores the relationship between the personal and the political,
the heightened responses of a man trapped in a moment of history.