Antanas Sileika – författare

Tomas Stumbras grew up in war-torn Eastern Europe: a dark, rainy land of misty hills and valleys, where the whispers of the ancient gods and devils are still heard by ordinary people. He is a god-maker, a sculptor with a gift for turning dead wood into protective saints for use in prayer. But it''s 1917 and even remote Lithuania feels the transforming effects of World War I. Caught between the destruction around him and his own drive to create, Tomas must abandon the stability of home and family and strike out on his own.Tomas moves from his thatched wooden farmhouse to the vibrant streets and artistic community of Paris in the Roaring Twenties, where temptation and jealous are right around the corner from brilliance, beauty and fame. Working as a carpenter in the Folies Bergere, he encounters the dance sensation Josephine Baker and falls for a lovely chorus girl. But even when he finally achieves his dream and becomes an artist, he discovers that success demands sacrifice. Even when you find art and love, infamy and betrayal aren''t far behind.Epic in scope and beautifully evocative of time and place, Woman in Bronze reveals a life lived in extremes. It tells a story of love found and lost, creative endeavour and the price of celebrity and stardom.Excerpt from Woman in BronzeEasterners flooded into Paris, and it hummed with Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Romanian, and many other languages among the porters and labourers. Tomas also saw many English and Americans, always rich, usually laughing, and often drunk. Waves were washing over the city from all ends of the world, churning into a froth in which even a talented person could drown.

“Some Unfinished Business is a powerful, moving, and page-turning examination of loyalty, betrayal, retribution and ultimately, love, written by an acclaimed author at the height of his powers.” — Gary Barwin, Governor General’s– and Giller-shortlisted author of Yiddish for Pirates and Nothing the Same, Everything HauntedIs love more compelling than justice? A wife pleads for love. Her husband longs for revenge.Gripping and evocative, Some Unfinished Business tells the story of a young man who is determined to prevail through anti-Soviet resistance in occupied Lithuania, imprisonment in the Gulag, and the icy hands of bureaucracy that attempt to thwart his love for a woman with a mysterious past — all while chasing the back of the man who dared him to dream in the first place.At fourteen, Martin Averka met a teacher from the city who inspired him to seek out the wide world beyond his small village of Lyn Lake. Years later, having lived under the tyranny of an autocratic system populated by cowards and bullies and seeking revenge, he breaks into the Pažaislis Monastery Asylum to confront face-to-face the man from his youth who betrayed his friends and colleagues a decade before.

In this comic Cold War novel, Canadian restaurateur Emmet Argentine is trapped in Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, under the tyranny of two equally formidable forces: the Soviet Union, and his staunchly socialist mother.Raised in the kitchens of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, Emmet’s got a talent for hospitality that catches the attention of a high-ranking architect, who hires him to helm a magnificent new restaurant. Under Emmet’s direction, the Seaside Café Metropolis, though located neither by the sea nor in a major metropolitan area, attracts a colourful cast of bohemian artists, writers, and philosophers, including a visit from Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir — all while kgb operatives listen in from the basement via microphones in the bread baskets.Through guile, wit, and charm, Emmet, his staff, and other restaurant regulars strive to make rich lives for themselves in the heart of the repressive Soviet regime, drawing warmth from good food, good humour, and even better company.