One Woman's War

Revenge Vs. Forgiveness. The Balkans and New York City. 1990’s. Civil Wars and City struggles. Neighbors who live together but don’t see eye to eye on the hard core values, both in Easter Europe and The Big Apple. Danger and resentment hum under the surface, like a dragon waiting to catch a wave. When the threat emerges, it’s a runaway train. The Village. Young, beautiful Yelena, already a widow, becomes childless due to a brutal murder. Finding her grief to be unbearable, and justice out of reach, she flees. The City. Hoping to find comfort with her sister and her family who live in Queens, New York, Yelena, a stranger in a strange, seeks healing. Her sister’s husband thinks a little temporary job might help, and sets her up to be a cleaning lady at a newspaper office in Manhattan, the night shift. The unexpected unfolds. She meets a journalist down on his luck who works nights, looking to get back on top. He’s restless, she’s lost, the connect. A most improbably tryst, yet it is a genuine one, until through him (Jake) she discovers who is responsible for her son’s murder. Against Jake’s will, she goes back to her homeland. The Return. Is she seeking justice or revenge? Yelena is not sure herself, but she’s driven for some kind of retribution to occur. However, Yelena is now pregnant with Jake’s child, and the notion of taking the law into her own hands seems unlikely. The tension inside her builds as she refuses to face the futility of the situation. Taking the law in her own hands, medieval rules reign, and she’s out for blood. The unpredictable yet inevitable sweeps the reader to a startling, unforeseeable and thrilling conclusion.

The Balkans. 1990’s. Civil War. Revenge vs. Forgiveness. Doctor Zhivago meets Gone With the Wind. How does love factor into a ferocious time of vengeful spite. An innocent mountain village is ripped apart by fractious, centuries-old hatred. When a key player flees to New York City for respite, how does a victim become a predator? The Village. A beautiful, fiery young widow, Yelena, flees her mountain village in Kosovo, Serbia, after her young son has been brutally slaughtered in the ongoing civil strife there. Always having been good friends with her Muslim neighbors, she is shocked by the prevailing opinion that the crime was done in the spirit of jihad. The police failure to round up a single suspect infuriates her, but she refuses to believe the rumblings of the Christian/Muslim divisiveness in her homeland. It becomes unbearable for her to stay there, and in her desperate feeling of futility and fury, she seeks refuge in New York with her sister and her sister’s American husband and children. The City. Yelena arrives in Queens, New York, in her sister’s three room apartment, in the hope of healing her wrenching grief. While there, she gets a job as a cleaning lady on the graveyard shift in a news office, where she meets Jake, a handsome, charming, though bitterly divorced American journalist, who is down on his luck. He keeps late hours in the news office where Yelena cleans. He’s restless, she’s lost. Two searching souls, different cultures, different languages, different codes of honor, find themselves in an unintended tryst. He researches the Balkans, while she studies the rules of baseball, and it looks like two diverse paths could become one until she stumbles upon some clippings Jake has been collecting from innumerable sources about the Balkans in an effort to understand his new found beloved. One clipping reveals the identity of the man who killed her son. It’s written in Serbian and Jake couldn’t read it, so didn’t know what it would do to Yelena. She reels at the realization the suspect is the husband of her best friend and neighbor, a Muslim. Yelena shows the teeth of a mother tiger. Jake no longer knows who she is when she states she’s going back home for justice. They fight it out like arch enemies. Their values couldn’t be more divergent. He fails to keep her from what she calls her duty. A chasm forms between them. She leaves him, carrying his child in her womb. The Return. Back in the village, Yelena, six months pregnant, draws disdain, judgment and gossip. Her relatives want to know why she came. For justice, she says. Her wise old Aunt Sofia who raised her, asks if she’s sure it’s not for revenge. Yelena decides to take the law into her own hands in order to accomplish the vengeance she cannot accomplish through the courts. She’s playing by medieval rules now, and she knows it. The unexpected, unpredictable and yet somehow inevitable unfolding of events has the reader breathless with surprise as each action brings us to a startling, unforeseeable and thrilling conclusion.

NATALIJA NOGULICH, a Chicago native, divides her time between Chicago and Los Angeles where she is Adjunct Professor at the Art Center College of Design and at the AFI Conservatory. Accomplished actress of Broadway, and over a hundred films and television shows, she has received numerous Drama-Logue Critics awards for acting and directing. She founded and directed THE GRACE PLAYERS Theatre Company in Hollywood which successfully produced her adaptation of 'Camille' entitled THE DAME OF NEW ORLEANS. ONE WOMAN'S WAR is her debut novel. It is the first of a trilogy.