On Thursday, April 7, took place the launching of David Unger´s latest novel at the Instituto Cervantes of New York .
There was a short reading of the book followed by a conversation between David Unger, Johnny Temple, (publisher of Akashic Books), and Andrea Montejo, (director of the Indent Literary Agency).
The Price of Escape depicts three days in the life of Samuel Berkow, a German Jew who leaves Nazi Germany by boat in 1938 to Guatemala where his cousin Heinrich awaits his arrival.
As the tramp steamer approaches Puerto Barrios, Samuel is full of hope that he will be able to remake his life in the New World. But having spent the better part of the last fifteen years recovering from his injuries in the Great War, navigating between mismatched parents and pining for Lena, the wife who abandoned him, he is ill-equipped to grapple with the malicious, often sadistic, characters that inhabit a hot, seedy port town. From the moment he gets off the boat, Samuel falls victim to them. It’s only when he commits an act he never thought he was capable of that he starts the slow journey to become the man he needs to be.
About the author
Guatemalan-born David Unger’s novel The Price of Escape will be published by Akashic Books and Para Mi, Eres Divina (In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful) by Random House Mondadori, Mexico, both in April 2011. He is the author of Ni chicha, ni limonada (Guatemala: F y G Editores, Record Books (2010), and Life in the Damn Tropics (Syracuse University Press, 2002, Wisconsin University Press, 2004). He has been a guest of la Feria Internacional del Libro de Lima, La Paz, Ciudad de Guatemala and Festival de la Palabra de San Juan. He works as a representative of Festival de Guadalajara in the US and he is a translation teacher at City College of New York
