EUGENIA AT THE CROSSROAD

Book excerpt: They met in the rebellious campus of Columbia University during the 1960s, the days of the Civil Rights, women’s movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests. Jenny was a post-grad aspiring to transform her activism into a journalistic crusade; Siegfried a young and handsome German law student charismatic and unyielding haunted by his family’s past. Random encounters soon turned into sleepless nights; a passionate love story was born! In 1968 Siegfried arrived in Rhodesia (current day Zimbabwe) a break-away British colony in Southern Africa, as a member of a legal U.N. team to investigate human rights violations and a few weeks later Jenny flies there to meet him with her wedding gown in her suitcase. Here in this exotic but racially segregated paradise, the couple witnessed in the impoverished African townships and the countryside, what oblivious white settlers refuse to accept, and what the hardline white regime’s propaganda machine systematically conceals: a fast-approaching African revolution. When Jenny crossed paths with an unconventional and scientific warfare contractor, an immense figure of unparallel political influence, wealth and charms and repressive colonial military background, she will -unintentionally- find herself in the shadowy corridors of Southern Africa’s deep state operating behind the mainstream political smokescreen. She will also discover a dark side she never imagined existed: her own. Placed against a historical backdrop that spans from the hedonistic Cabaret Berlin of 1920s, wartime Germany and Nazi occupied Greece to the 1960s America, and the apartheid era in South Africa; And from Southern Africa’s killing fields to the 108th floor of World Trade Center’s north tower on September 11, 2001, Ms. Y is a cross-genre psychological drama, epic in scope, that deconstructs rather than glorifies power, examines the depths of human controversy, delivers provocative social messages and blends history, mythical allegory and fictional narrative in a fast-pacing plot dominated by three bigger than controversial protagonists tested by love and promiscuity, moral conflicts and momentous circumstances.