Publisher's Synopsis
Can words on a page, written centuries ago, really connect lives in the present? Octogenarian Anna believes that they can, and upon meeting sixteen year-old Andrew, she makes it her task to get the boy to see connections between the words of a particular writer - William Shakespeare - and Andrew's own life, by recounting her own story.Thus begins Anna's tale. In 1940, living in a small Slovak village, almost completely unaware of the war that rages around her, she happens upon a troupe of travelling performers and meets Viecko, a young actor with a passion for the works of William Shakespeare. Viecko begins teaching Anna Shakespeare, and the treachery, tragedy, comedy and - most of all - love begin to spill off of the pages and into their lives. Leaving her village, Anna's story becomes connected to the struggle of the Resistance, the horrors of the concentration camps, the joy of new birth and the rebuilding of life in the aftermath of the Second World War. Young Andrew is fascinated, and in the midst of listening to her story, begins to discover a connection, not only between Anna and him, but between his life and the words that have inspired Anna's.Spanning the course of sixty years and set both in modern times and in the painful years of the Second World War and its aftermath behind the Iron Curtain, Anna's Rhapsody speaks of the tragedy, terror, hope and love of humankind, and the ability to share it all through words on a page.
