Dear Reader,
I invite you to join me on a voyage to Transylvania where my imagination has borrowed politics and history to create a different view of Literature: Facts fuse with Fiction in Transylvanian Trilogy.
Gift of Diamonds, Love Odyssey, and Treasure Seekers, each book of the trilogy, can be read independently, or interchanged, depending on your choice. The main characters are Anca, Mica, Cristina and Marina, four best friends since their teenaged days in Transylvania, who appear and reappear in each book. They were known in their little town as the Four Musketeers, Poets of their Lives.
Gift of Diamonds is Mica’s story and her escape with rare colored diamonds as Communism in Romania explodes under dictator, Ceausescu. Love Odyssey is Anca’s quest as she escapes alone from Transylvania while pregnant and targeted because as a doctor, she had access to antibiotics during a typhus epidemic and shared them with non-communists and gypsies.
Marina and Cristina take center stage in Treasure Seekers. As successful women living in New York City and Paris, they vacation together in Turkey, to fall unexpectedly, into a web of Terrorists.
Their stories flow together amidst crimes and lies of international intrigues. I have used the historical settings as a novelist would – to enhance the fictional storyline. Yet, I must confess, I have sometimes been tempted to make the history a little more exciting with brush strokes of color. Accordingly, I’ve taken liberties under the guise of “poetic license” with time and place to recreate a literary fresco of Romania’s second half of the 20th century. The history is the “backdrop curtain” of the novels, not center stage.
I have used Romania’s dictatorial regimes to create an atmosphere of deceit that poisoned all Romanians during those years. One form of totalitarian government led to another: Fascism opened the door to Communism which encouraged Terrorism. All were times of secret police, informers, fear, lies, double-crossing, dehumanization, shredding of documents, the destruction of the human soul. What we know today about those times is masked with inconsistencies and ambiguities to cover up Evil.
I hope you enjoy this colorful kaleidoscope of Fact with Fiction, History and Politics, Strife with Love. For it is from my heart that I offer you these stories from Transylvania.
Roberta Seret, Ph.D.
LIST OF CHARACTERS:
As you read Transylvanian Trilogy, please find a list of characters who you can follow as they appear and reappear in Gift of Diamonds, Love Odyssey, and Treasure Seekers.
Gift of Diamonds
- Mica Mihailescu: When she is an adult, she is director of choreography for the Martha Graham Group. Her parents are: Anton, an engineer and Corina, a librarian. She is married to Andre, an American physician, specializing in Cardiology at New York Hospital.
- Treasure Seekers. Marina Johannes: When she is an adult, she is an entrepreneur, specializing in Cosmetics. She is a widow, her husband was Stefan, who worked with her.
- Cristina Patrisse: When she is an adult, she is a famous fashion designer. She works and lives in Paris with her husband, Eugen Siminescu, who works for the C.I.A. with Petre
- Tahquitz: He is a Native American Indian from the Taos Tribe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is a physician, specializing in Pediatrics and Eastern American Indian Medicine.
Love Odyssey
- Anca Rodescu: She is a physician, specializing in Pediatrics at New York Hospital. She is married to Petre lianu, who works for the C.I.A. and will bring down Ceausescu as the leader of the Romanian revolution of 1989. Their daughter is Sandra (Sandi). The Gypsy: Evdochia. Her son is Tanase
- Alec Hirsch: As a young man he worked with Anca’s father in espionage activities. He helps her escape Transylvania. Shortly after, he, too, escapes to New York, and from there, works with the C.I.A. as part of the group of Romanians to bring down Ceausescu.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky–Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat Minor, Op. 23-1. Allegro Non Troppo