A Shower of Roses

Eva's mission in life is to help people by doing little things for them, instead of performing great heroic acts. She is a pediatric nurse at a hospital in New York, and things are going well for her when she meets Marek, a Polish exile, and falls in love with him. Marek ostensibly works for a large international bank, but that is a cover for his role as a CIA agent with the mission of fomenting a popular uprising against the communist government of Poland. At the request of the CIA the bank transfers him to London, where the story opens in April 1981, shortly after Poland announced that it would be unable to repay its foreign debt and the Solidarity movement emerged in the port of Gda sk. Eva had never dreamed of marrying a man like Marek, but she responds to his need for love, and she devotes her life to him. She is fully aware that his work is dangerous, and every time he goes to Poland she worries that he will be arrested by the secret police. Though he drags her into a world of political intrigue and tests her love by subjecting her to increasingly painful experiences, she keeps her promise to love him no matter what he does, until she confronts the truth about him-and about herself.