Winner of the 1999 Greek State Prize for Best Novel

Rather than consent to spinsterhood at age twenty-seven, Eleni Altamura sets sail with her seafaring father to Italy, where she is to study painting at the famed School of the Nazarenes. Once in Naples, Eleni flees her female identity and, disguised as a young man, walks with her father to Rome. Along the way she falls in love with her would-be husband while learning to navigate life in a man's world--as a man. But when love reveals her femininity, Eleni marries the father of her children, the first of the many tragedies she will have to endure. She continues to question her identity as her life choices spark rumors she may be a powerful, mad magician, or just another crazy old woman.

The Great Persuader is the biography of a robber baron, the greatest railroad mogul of them all-Collis P. Huntington, the Sacramento, California, storekeeper who, along with Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, parlayed $1,500 into America's first continental railroad. It is an almost unbelievable story of a high dream of fortune realized through highhanded practices-an adventure which left the national treasury poorer by millions of swindled dollars, and America itself richer by a national railroad system which contributed greatly to the country's westward expansion.

How did Huntington operate? What were his methods? Was he corrupt? These are questions that were previously unanswered but thanks to the cooperation of the Huntington family who supplied Mr. Lavender with material that had never before been made public, Lavender shows just how Collis P. Huntington operated-and it was defintely outside the law, although well inside the prevailing morality of his time. It shows his complicated dealings with Sanford Hopkins, how he bested such tycoons as Thomas A. Scott, John C. Durrant, Oliver Ames and Jay Gould, how Huntington accumulated the great fortune which was the legacy to his family, and how his great railroad network was to prove an unparalleled legacy to all Americans. The Great Persuader is a powerful story of a remarkable man whose singleness of purpose and ruthless manipulation of men and money propelled the great enterprise forward against all odds.