The Swedish actress Greta Garbo valued her privacy and often used the name Harriet Brown when she wanted to travel or check into hotels incognito.
She also valued her inner privacy, and her biographies, in my view, only hint at the spirit inside.
This novel—very much a lie that I hope tells the truth—seeks to portray the woman, the spirit, behind the most beautiful face of its time, through the eyes and voice of her fictitious illegitimate son.
To buy, click the image, or click here.
For other countries: the UK—here, Germany—here, France—here, Italy—here, and Spain—here.
A great thing with the Amazon Kindle store is that it allows you to download a sample (as a rule the opening chapters) of the book for free.
From C. Rehmert’s Amazon Review:
This is a wonderfully captivating novel, perhaps what you call a page-turner. Behind the alias of Harriet Brown is hidden Greta Garbo, who, in this novel, gives her secret son of three months to his father, to avoid the child to grow up in the limelight of her movie-star fame and also to save him from her unpredictable personality. The father of the child is an Indian mystic, famous in his days; the child grows up mainly with his grandparents in India.
A simple live in Indian tradition, in the spirit of Buddhism; told here with a deep insight in this highly spiritual religion. The reader is being lead into spiritual and magical worlds, following the child in his growing-up experiences until, as a young promising professional, he meets his mother. This happens sometimes in mundane, everyday fashion while sometimes magic interferes to bring them together.
The distinct voice of the author transfers the reader into strange and foreign inner and outer worlds. A reading experience full of wonder, amazement, anguish and joyousness.
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When my mother was twelve years old, directing imaginary plays from the little outhouse roof in her tenement back yard, she knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the world.
Standing by her living room window, catching a brown and watery glimpse of the East River these many years later, she knew it to be a bad place.
Whether this knowledge had gathered little by little over the intervening years, cloud by cloud, and just now let on; or whether it had sprung, a gray horizon to horizon upon an unsuspecting sky just moments ago, since finishing her breakfast, she couldn’t tell. Only that it was so obvious now.
But she mustn’t let this ruin her day. She slipped into her beige duffle coat, donned her sunglasses, covered her head with a gray and black scarf, patted her coat pocket to hear the keys tinkle, made sure she had her cigarettes, and her lighter, and without as much as a word of good-bye to Claire, headed out for her morning walk.