Theodora Tzoka (Teddie) was born in Greece and was raised and educated for the most part in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the third out of four daughters of Greek immigrant parents. Upon leaving Greece, her parents took along a handful of soil from their garden and two big dreams. The first was the dream to one day return to their motherland. The second was a University education for their daughters. Both dreams were realized. Theodora majored in English literature at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is a teacher, a translator and an aspiring writer. Many of her poems, articles and short stories have been published in Free Press magazines and newspapers throughout Greece. Ghosts of People Past is her first published novel soon to be translated into English by the author herself and when done will be available at Amazon and wherever else possible. Currently, she is working on her second novel.
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Ghosts of People Past begins with a series of mysterious events that happen to fifty-year-old Nora one snowy night in a remote mountain village of Western Macedonia, Greece. Upon returning home from a cousin’s funeral, she finds an email on her computer from the Algerian archaeology student she once nearly loved to death. This triggers off a surge of memories and reopens unresolved issues with her past, the closure she never got and the guilty secrets she has harbored. With the help of a bottle of whisky and her resurrected cat, she begins to dust off her memories and starts to write her life story determined to finish it in one night before it is too late. From Boston to Thessaloniki and from Rome to Algeria she narrates the events of her life that stigmatized her forever: her expulsion from her home in Boston by her parents, the cultural shock of moving to Greece, her doomed love for a Muslim student in the hard and gloomy years of the Greek dictatorship in Greece. Her communication with her ex-boyfriend via MSN unravels on a second plane of narration and leads to dramatic revelations which force Nora to face a past she has spent years struggling to forget. The dimensions of time mesh in a strange game of alternating reality and fantasy right up to the books cathartic end.
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