Alki Zei was born in 1925 in Athens. She studied Philosophy, Dramatic Arts and Cinematography and she published her first play for puppet theater. She lived in exile during the Dictatorship of the colonels and she came back to Greece in 1964. Her books have been translated to numerous languages and obtained several national and international book awards, including the Greek National Children’s Literature Award.
Constandine is a Greek teenager who, because of health problems, is forced to leave the German city of Aquisgran, where she was living with her parents, and to come back to Athens, where she is going to live with her grandmother, but without the warm and living references of her previous life. The coexistence with her grandmother, a former partisan that fought against Germany, is troubled and both of them ignore each other.
Grandmother does it because she can’t find in her granddaughter any understanding or interest about her anti-fascist past live, about the struggle against dictatorship and German occupancy. The granddaughter does it because her trick to overcome that coexistence is taking refuge in her classmate, who is also rootless and whose life also took place in Germany. This classmate takes her to drug use. Both of them dream about coming back to a happy life.
“A very special novel that allows us to recover this excellent writer, who was awarded with a National Prize of Literature in her country” (Ana Garralón in Educación y Biblioteca).