Yeva

A woman is alone in the kitchen of her home in the Armenian countryside when one of the most severe earthquakes of the Twentieth Century strikes the region. Emerging unscathed from the ruins of her collapsed home, Yeva runs twelve kilometers and wades across a freezing river to fetch her children at school only to find a huge pile of rubble where the children's school had stood. 


Yeva's husband, a stone mason working on the renovation of an ancient monastery deep in the Caucasus Mountains near the epicenter of the earthquake, is missing and presumed dead. For the next year and a half Yeva drifts from shelter to shelter until she manages to obtain a visa and emigrate to the United States, where she finds employment as a domestic worker for a family in a Pennsylvania suburb.


While coping with the challenges of adjusting to a new language and culture, Yeva is also faced with the family drama of her new employers.


Unknown to Yeva, her Armenian husband---presumed to have died at the construction site where he was working at the time of the earthquake---has actually survived the disaster and is recuperating from severe head injury at a hospital in Tblisi, just north of the Armenian border where he was transported after being rescued from the remote mountain location by a helicopter rescue team.


The story continues to follow the principal characters, moving back and forth between continents until, in a fateful series of events their lives intersect in a bittersweet conclusion.


Here is what the judges of the 18th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards had to say about YEVA: Author Sondra Wolferman has penned an intricate plot in YEVA. The author's passion for the subject is evident in this carefully researched novel. The settings are at times unusual and the author does a great job of transporting the reader. The characters are interesting and the reader wants to learn more about them. There is a strong sense of plot movement and the pacing hums along at a steady speed. The story concept is strong, with just the right amoung of suspense to sustain the reader's interest level. The conflict is apparent and cannot easily be solved, with rising conflict as the story escalates...Readers of YEVA will throughly enjoy this evocative read.