AND MY MOTHER’S BITTER TEARS by DEMETRIUS TOTERAS

This book is dynamite!

Colenso Books 68 PALATINE ROAD LONDON N16 8ST U.K. 

colensobooks@gmail.com 

Announcing the publication of a novel completed in the 1990s but never published until now, many years after the author’s death  -

AND MY MOTHER’S BITTER TEARS by DEMETRIUS TOTERAS

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Booksellers in the USA can order from the international book distributors

GARDNERS BOOKS LTD OF EASTBOURNE, UK (internationalsales@gardners.com)

In case of difficulty, or for alternative quotations for delivery direct from the printers, contact the publisher (colensobooks@gmail.com)

From the flyer:

There is no doubt that this is, to a considerable extent, an autobiographical novel. It is also clear that parts of it are fictional, but it is not possible to define with any clarity the boundary between autobiography and fiction. The author did serve in the US Army in the Korean War as an underage soldier, and the novel begins with the narrator’s return from Korea, suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Finding himself unable to face his family again, he is taken up by a young woman who looks after him. This narrative breaks off to be resumed only in the final chapter of the book, and there follow several chapters in which his early life in San Francisco's Greektown in the 1940s is recounted. Conflicting demands — of their families to be Greek and of their school to become Americans — drive him and his best friend to obtain fake birth certificates, enabling them to enlist, in 1949, at the age of fourteen, in the US infantry. Between basic training and embarkation for the Far East they take a bizarre trip to Mexico, where they become involved with a rich American couple who need to involve others in their sex-life. The two teenage soldiers are sent to the Mariana Islands where they are occupied in dismantling a World-War-Two ammunition dump. After an explosion which kills some of their colleagues, they are granted leave, and go to Japan. Through a series of mishaps there, they end up being sent to Korea with the first scratch-force of US troops, following the news that the North Koreans had crossed the 38th Parallel. They are involved in the first US battles of the Korean War, battles in which the US army was repeatedly defeated with immense loss of life. These battles are described in graphic and horrific detail, bringing us face to face with the insanity and the horror of war, and with the nature of fear. The book, though, is not without humour, and much of the humour has to do with sex. In this the narrator and his buddy are opposites: the narrator a romantic innocent, his buddy precocious and sex-mad. Although, the narrative of the weeks after his return alone from Korea is resumed in the concluding chapter, there is no conclusion, for we are left with a final moment of dramatic suspense, unsure exactly what it is that has just happened, and with no clue as to what the narrator’s future will be.