Summary:
In Warsaw, a shy and high-minded polio victim lives a life of seclusion caring for her odd family until a chance encounter plunges her into the intrigues of dirty politics; Zaremba, a wealthy businessman, is about to be arrested on trumped-up charges and only she can save him. Swept along by events, Cordelia finds her feelings increasingly involved with a stranger for whom she is both rescuer and victim. When Zaremba disappears, Cordelia must overcome surveillance, corruption, the media, and mounting humiliations and difficulties to learn the truth.
Although set in Poland, this is a story that could happen anywhere, as young democracies struggle against the temptations of covert operations and older democracies sometimes lead them astray.
Excerpt - In the hospital Her father was in the furthest of five beds. “Ah,” he greeted Cordelia with a loud moan as they entered the room, “They’ve been giving me to drink mandragora. Mandragora in its worst form. Get me out of here.” “Breakfast must have been bad,” Cordelia explained in a murmured aside to her companion. “Yes, we’ve come to take you home,” said Cordelia more loudly. His voice sounded thin and tired but had its usual buoyant timbre. “I wish to leave,” he waved an arm full of tubing at the other four elderly men in the room, “‘these fat and greasy citizens’.” “Shh, Tato!” Cordelia admonished him in scandalized accents. But the apostrasized citizens – perfectly slim and trim – watched Cordelia and Zaremba proceed through the room with the curiosity born of utter boredom, and no sign of having understood. “Hi, Tato,” said Cordelia, coming up to his bedside, “how’re you feeling?” He didn’t answer. He was staring at Zaremba. “Who are you?” he asked. Cordelia froze. She hadn’t thought of what she was going to tell her father. She opened her mouth and closed it again several times, like a carp out of water she thought later in disgust. Zaremba answered for her. “Your son-in-law, don’t you remember?” Cordelia’s father turned his head and gave his daughter a wild look from under raised brows. “I have forgotten many things”, he murmured, “and will, I hope, live to forget many more, but that I had acquired a son-in-law, I don’t think would have passed me quite by.” Cordelia spoke quickly. “I’ll explain everything later. They’re letting you go home, so I’ll collect your clothes, and if you want to get dressed, we can go. Here’s the nurse to undo your IV.” She bustled about and soon they retreated into the hallway again while he dressed. “What am I going to tell him?” Cordelia muttered urgently to Zaremba during a break in the stream of visitors filling the aisles. But he wasn’t listening. He was staring at something down the end of the hallway. Abruptly he swung in front of her. “Cordelia,” he said swiftly, “that door just behind you, step back and step through it. Quick!” The urgency in voice was such that she was impelled to obey. She backed a scraping, hasty step, pushed against a heavy door and was about to step through when she was grasped and almost whiskedor lifted inside by Zaremba, who pulled the door shut behind him. It was dark. “What…?” she cried, startled, feeling her back bump against a shelf – a linen closet, she felt instinctively – the man’s body against hers. He moved away. “Shhh.” “What is it?” she whispered, not liking the situation at all, her heart pounding. “I saw someone I know,” he whispered back, “someone who works at city hall in the planning department…Of all the bad luck! I suppose he’s visiting someone. Cholera take him!” “But we can’t stay here!” “Just a moment. Shhh.” But at that moment someone grasped the door from the outside and pulled it firmly shut. There was the sound of a key turning in a lock. “Bugger!” “I wish you’d stop saying that!” Cordelia whispered fiercely. “We’re locked in.” The man laughed under his breath. “Yes. What would you say?” “This is intolerable!” “Do you want to scream?” ‘Bugger,’ thought Cordelia, and then, ‘this man is demoralizing me’. And then, this is, this is…she was torn between an impulse to burst into hysterical giggles and another to pound her fists on the door. Her father would be waiting for her, waiting, waiting, and she wouldn’t appear. “If you wanted to hide here, okay,” she snapped in an underbreath at the well of darkness in front of her that she knew to contain the man. “But why did you have to take me with you?” “Misery loves company.” “What if they don’t open the door again till tomorrow? It’s a linen closet, did you see?” “We’ll have to hope someone dies,” he whispered back, his voice sounding uncomfortably close to her ear, “And that they remember to change the sheets for the next patient.”
Bio: Michelle Granas was born in Alaska, but currently divides her time between Oregon and Poland. She has degrees in philosophy and comparative literature, but now works s a translator. Over the past dozen years she has translated for many of Poland's major politicians and writers, including short pieces for the Nobel Prize winner Lech Walesa and Nobel Prize nominee Ryszard Kapuscinski. Social Media Links Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6942231.Michelle_Granas Buy Links Amazon: http://amzn.to/19YGQyv B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/zaremba-or-love-and-the-rule-of-law-michelle-granas/1114303818?ean=9780988859203 Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/273954 Prize: 1 paperback copy (open internationally)
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