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
About Johnny Temple and Andrea Montejo
Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction. Temple won the American Association of Publishers’ 2005 Miriam Bass Award for Creativity in Independent Publishing. Temple plays bass guitar in the band Girls Against Boys, which has toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums on independent and major record companies. Temple has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including The Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, Poets & Writers, and BookForum. He is also the Chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which works with Brooklyn’s borough president to plan the annual Brooklyn Book Festival in September.
A native of Colombia, Andrea Montejo graduated from the University of Paris -Sorbonne. She started her career in publishing at HarperCollins in New York, where she was one of the founding editors of Rayo, the company’s Latino and Spanish-language imprint. Responsible for the publication of over 30 titles a year, she focused on bringing authors from Spain and Latin America to the United States. In 2007, Andrea started the Indent Literary Agency, where she represents Latino and Latin American authors for the U.S. market and throughout the world.
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