Nicolai’s Daughters is the first published novel of Stella Leventoyiannis Harvey (by Signature Editions) shedding light on how much secret shame can affect the lives of the people living with it. Confronting the negative emotions and bringing private secrets into the open are the main pillars of the novel that took six years to be completed.
The Sarinopoulos family has many secrets burried away and the fear of shame is strongly determining their behavior. Alexia travels to Diakofto in the Peloponnese, Greece, to fulfil her father’s dying wish to find her half sister Theodora, whose existence was kept a secret by Nikolai throughout his life.
The Vancouver lawyer meets her father’s side of the family and her grandfather refuses to recognize her since she is not of Greek blood and not born into wedlock. But there is more behind his abrupt and rude behavior than meets the eye.
Alexia finds she knows nothing about the culture of the Greek village and her family relatives living in times of economic crisis. The Sarinopoulos family has long been marked by tragedy, war, and a shame fanned by idle village gossip. Looming over Alexia’s visit and the one trip back to Greece her father had taken twenty-five years earlier, is the tragedy of Kalavryta, a Second World War massacre that changed the family forever. The story is told in the two changing voices of Alexia and Nicolai, who each return to Greece to mourn a loss and find solace.
Harvey was born in Cairo and moved to Calgary as a child with her family. In 2001, Harvey founded the Whistler Writers Group, also known as the Vicious Circle, which each year produces the Whistler Writers Festival under her direction. Harvey’s fiction short stories have appeared in The Literary Leanings Anthology, The New Orphic Review, Emerge Magazine and The Dalhousie Review. Her non-fiction work has appeared in Pique Newsmagazine, The Question and the Globe and Mail. She currently lives with her husband in Whistler, but visits her many relatives in Greece often.
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