Odysseas' Heel

This is the story of a hurricane romance between a man at an age when love - to paraphrase Agatha Christie - strikes hardest, and a younger woman with everything going for her, who sees her perfect future blown up in her face. The ways of fate are inscrutable… or are they the tricks of the gods? Our hero is a second generation Greek American, born and raised in Astoria, Queens, N.Y.C., from a family of little means. Odysseas Mandrakis, working-class hero who through talent, inventivity, guts, and unrestraint ambition fulfills the American dream, rising from the bitter poverty of his youth and the anonymity of the masses, with his Greek heritage on second base playing up from time to time. Our heroine, a Bostonian high society debutante in post Worldwar II America of the Cold War, the Korean War and the War in Vietnam; American princess in Paris during the existentialist 1950s, in Amsterdam during the revolutionary 1960s and in the Big Apple during the early roaring 1970s.